Re: Download accelerator
On Mon, Mar 17, 2003 at 12:02:37PM -0500, ScruLoose wrote:
> Back in my Windoze days, I used to have great fun saturating my DSL line
> with GetRight... and I had wondered about download managers under Debian
> myself (Though it hadn't made it to the top of my stack of priorities
> yet...)
I have found it necessary to use GetRight to saturate a dialup under
Windoze. If Windoze is allowed to use its own downloading mechanisms
it has an infuriating habit of sitting around scratching its arse for
several seconds at frequent intervals while the TD/RD LEDs remain
dark. This is less of a problem when using GetRight, even without
doing parallel downloads, though it is usually necessary to do at
least two downloads in parallel to prevent it completely.
Sometimes these pauses seem to be caused by the server at the other
end scratching its own arse, in which case GetRight's ability to send
regular pings seems to help.
Linux seems to have much less of an itchy arse, so I can tell phoenix
to download something and it happily uses all the dialup bandwidth
without great long pauses.
To make most efficient use of the dialup when wgetting large numbers
of files, I find it helpful to run a couple of wgets in parallel, so
that the gaps in transmission which occur when one wget is requesting
the next file can be used by the other wget for downloading.
It does seem that wget can do all that GetRight does and more, but
there is less need for it as a replacement for browser downloads. As a
tool for using metered dialups most efficiently, some form of download
manager type software is invaluable. For example, I can copy from
debian-user emails the URLs of documentation that people have
recommended for some task I'm interested in, to a file, and when that
file reaches a reasonable size, run wget to retrieve all the documents
in one go. This is much more efficient than connecting, downloading
and disconnecting again for each URL as I read the email.
IIRC d4x is simply a graphical frontend to wget. I tried it when I was
running slink, but it didn't work, so I settled for running wget in
one xterm and man wget in another one. This works well enough that I
haven't bothered to try d4x under woody.
Pigeon
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