The speeds have improved tremendously, over the last couple of years some significant improvements have been made. There’s still more bandwidth overhead using I2P over a traditional connection but it has been significantly reduced and is not as noticeable anymore. That being said, there’s still some configuration that’s necessary to maximize your bandwidth. The biggest complaint I hear about the standard i2p install is that it uses extremely conservative bandwidth settings by default but it can all be easily adjusted to maximize performance on your router. I’ve used I2PD quite a bit but overall I actually much prefer standard Java I2P because it’s far more feature rich, more frequently maintained, and settings are muuuuch much easier to configure and understand. There are still many brilliant optimizations in Java I2P that have not made it into I2PD such as the most recent peer analysis techniques that can automatically block/ban misbehaving peers among other things too. I personally think I2PD is best if I just need to host a low resource tunnel… But back to the speed!

As was already mentioned the more people who participate, the more I2P thrives. One of the most notable differences is that most I2P nodes right now are just enthusiasts running on recycled hardware at a residential address whereas clear net torrents are much more mainstream and many common/popular torrents have at least one peer hosted at a data center with virtually unlimited bandwidth, that one peer usually contributes to over 50% of your download speed on a standard torrent.

I have my router bandwidth setting on my 24/7 router set pretty high and my router usually idles at about 850 KBps… My most recent peak was about 1.3MBps, very acceptable speeds I think. I get the best i2p torrent download speeds using Snark which is built into Java I2P, the only important setting to change is increase tunnel quantity to 10 to maximize your download bandwidth. I have seen some of my downloads seed at about 200+ KBps and I have downloaded at almost a full 1MBps which are comparable speeds to standard clear torrent downloads.

So, in a nutshell, it’s not necessarily slower than a standard torrent download (well, maybe a little bit) but what it does have is significantly more variability in bandwidth and download speed depending on how many hops or peers are in between you and your target destination. More hops creates more variance (and more anonymity), you could be directly connected to someone in a data center but the next hop could be connected to a raspberry pi running off of public Wi-Fi which will be the bottleneck in that connection.