[H-GEN] Multi-thread downloads

David Harrison trogspam at games.telstra.com
Thu May 27 00:38:44 EDT 2004


> Thirdly, download "accelerators" are rude. A web/ftp server has a set
> amount of bandwidth, which it tries to share equally among its
> clients. If you set four threads going, you're using four times your
> "share", slowing things down for everyone else. If everyone sets four
> threads going, it makes no difference than if no one does. So stop
> being a leecher, and wait your turn.

To extend on this - as someone that has had to deal with
download-accelerator-using fiends for a while, I find that a bigger factor
is that they take up more 'slots' on a server. For example, we've had users
taking up to _10_ connections on our apache servers (ie, each connection
they make fires up another httpd process to handle it). So a web server that
might be configured for a MaxClients of 250 is suddenly serving much, much
fewer users.

Until I discovered mod_limitipconn, anyway :)
(http://dominia.org/djao/limitipconn.html)

That said, I've been looking for a command-line download accelerator type
thing for the command line for a while - I've got large files that I
frequently need to move around and it'd be really handy to be able to start
grabbing bits of them from various servers where they're duplicated. I was
going to try and hack the functionality into wget but Prozilla looks like it
might be handy. Can you specify the list of alternate sources that it uses?

-- david





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