So I was downloading Mepis and its loafing along at 8-20KB/s and I was totally unimpressed. With 17 peers, at least 10 of which had 100% of the file I expected better performance.

Then out of boredom I started a download of Wolfenstine: Enemy Territory (per http://www.technewsworld.com/story/53645.html ).

That started booming in at well in excess of 500KB/s. Damn! That's more like it.

The ODD PART: While Wolf was screaming in at 500+, Mepis jumped up 3fold and was downloading at 60 to 120KB/s, and as soon as Wolf finished Mepis throttled back down to 8-24KB/s and has stayed there since.

Why would it do that? Why does running two downloads work better for BOTH than just one at a time?

That's very strange, normally 2 torrents should not influence each other (they might fight for bandwith, but this is not the case here), the connections are separate.

I will see if I can reproduce this.