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Download Manager myth

Download Managers or Download Accelerator claims to download your file up to 350% faster or even more. Do they really work? Always? How do they work? This post is for busting the myth that download managers always help to improve your speed and you won’t get full speed if you don’t use it. This thing […]

Download 5 Download Managers or Download Accelerator claims to download your file up to 350% faster or even more. Do they really work? Always? How do they work? This post is for busting the myth that download managers always help to improve your speed and you won’t get full speed if you don’t use it.

This thing needs a big clarification here. Download managers or accelerators do help but not always. The biggest advantage you get by using a download manager depends on the connecting server and your broadband speed itself. I will try to explain with an example.

Like, If a server can provide a file for downloading at the speed of 256 Kbps (32 KBps), and the user’s broadband speed is only 128 Kbps, then the download limit will be limited by the user’s bandwidth here. No download manager can help increase your speed here.

The only scenario where they can be of real help is where the user can support a higher speed transfer as compared to what the server offer to a single client. They then connect with the server as multiple clients and download the respective parts of file.

For example: Consider a scenario in which the user has a download speed of 512 Kbps (64KBps) and the server offer only a speed of 128 Kbps (16 KBps).

If the user is not using any download manager then the file will be downloaded only at the speed of 16KBps will not be able to download the file and the speed will be capped. This is where the download managers ( and accelerators) come into play. They connect as multiple clients and let the user download at the maximum speed of their connection. The server will treat them as 4 clients are downloading the file.

I hope you are now clear with what download managers can actually help. They are a good piece of code as they help in resuming interrupted download sessions but they are now already built in browsers like Firefox, Opera etc.

What’s your broadband speed? I work on 256 Kbps and don’t use any download manager. Do you use any?

5 responses to “Download Manager myth”

  1. Pallab says:

    I use DTA/Orbit/Xunlei Thunder. Thunder is phenomenally fast on my college WiFi. It does something which others are not able to do. While Orbit would download at 15-20 kBps Xunlei sometimes crosses 100KBps.

    At my home d/load managers don’t have a great effect on my downloading. I use Orbit Grab++ for sniffing out multimedia links and use any dload manager just for throttling my download (so that browsing isn’t slowed down).

    And finally, a nice article that disprooves one of the fundamental myths about Dload Managers.

  2. […] A refined version of this post – Download Manager myth. […]

  3. pankaj joshi says:

    Download manger helps you connect as multiple clients and speed up your downloads, but what i know is they use threads i hope you have heard it, (remember thread in java)).

    • Ashfame says:

      Using threads is a possible implementation of the algorithm and is not like that every one of them uses threads or are coded in JAVA. Hope that helps 🙂