Download acceleration uses multiple connections to a server to increase download speed. It is part of a download management package and similar to segmented downloading, but connects to a single server. It may not be effective if the receiving computer’s connection speed is slower than the server’s, and can overload servers for large websites.
Download acceleration is a process that computer software initiates to increase the speed of a download by creating multiple connections to a single server or host system. The software is usually built into a web browser and operates on a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP ). The premise of download acceleration is based on the fact that an HTTP connection could limit the amount of bandwidth used by a single connection. Using download acceleration means creating multiple server connections, each working in tandem to simultaneously download several segments of a single large file or multiple smaller files.
Web servers try to increase their efficiency by load balancing all active connections of users requesting information. The practice of limiting the bandwidth of a single connection is intended to allow multiple users to be able to send and receive information without a single connection hogging all server resources. A download accelerator connects to a server multiple times with each connection having the equivalent bandwidth allocated to a single usage. This causes the system to allocate more bandwidth overall to the accelerator.
Most download accelerator software is part of a much more complex download management package. Download managers are able to scan a website, isolate all media files, then create multiple connections to download all files at the same time. For a single large file, the manager will create multiple connections and download a different segment of the file across each one. Each segment is saved to disk and, at the end, reconstructed again in a single file.
The concept of download acceleration is similar to segmented downloading. Segmented download is used in peer-to-peer file transfer programs. This process involves connecting to multiple peer computers and transferring small segments of a larger file from different sources to spread out bandwidth usage. This is markedly different than what a download accelerator does because accelerators connect to a single server.
Download acceleration is not always effective, especially as speeds and bandwidth availability increase worldwide. If the connection speed of the server sending the file is faster than the connection speed of the receiving computer, then the acceleration will not work, because it is limited by the speed of receiving. The use of download accelerators is not recommended for large websites because it can overload the server and reduce the sending speed for all visitors to the site.
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