Download acceleration
Encyclopedia
Download acceleration, also known as multipart download, is a term for the method employed by software such as download manager
s to download a single file by splitting it in segments and using several simultaneous connections to download these segments from a single server.
The reason for doing so is to circumvent server side limitations of bandwidth per connection. Because in normal networking situations all individual connections are treated equally, rather than actual file transfers, multiple connections yields an advantage on saturated links over simple connections, both in terms of total bandwidth allocation and resilience. Many servers, however, implement a maximum number of simultaneous connections per client in order to mitigate this.
This is not to be confused with segmented downloading
, which allows a client to download segments of a file simultaneously from multiple servers.
Download manager
A download manager is a computer program dedicated to the task of downloading possibly unrelated stand-alone files from the Internet for storage...
s to download a single file by splitting it in segments and using several simultaneous connections to download these segments from a single server.
The reason for doing so is to circumvent server side limitations of bandwidth per connection. Because in normal networking situations all individual connections are treated equally, rather than actual file transfers, multiple connections yields an advantage on saturated links over simple connections, both in terms of total bandwidth allocation and resilience. Many servers, however, implement a maximum number of simultaneous connections per client in order to mitigate this.
This is not to be confused with segmented downloading
Segmented downloading
Segmented downloading can be a more efficient way of downloading files from many peers at once. The one single file is downloaded, in parallel, from several distinct sources or uploaders of the file...
, which allows a client to download segments of a file simultaneously from multiple servers.