Contact tracker (2 RTT UDP), contact some peers (2 RTT TCP, 1 RTT handshake, 1 RTT piece request and response, assuming a very small file). That's 5 RTT, about

Contact tracker (2 RTT UDP), contact some peers (2 RTT TCP, 1 RTT handshake, 1 RTT piece request and response, assuming a very small file). That's 5 RTT, about on par with HTTP 1.1 and TLS (though there's no TLS here). Existing bittorrent software is heavily optimized for batch downloads of big files, but that isn't in the protocol.