I’m afraid that download managers using download acceleration (create multiple TCP connections and use RANGE requests) only serve to hide the underlying problems, but it does seem that some people in congested networks really need them essentially to push past the congestion or server limits, in effect taking a larger slice of the pie than everybody else. Usually I explain this and I’m told simply that they bought their bandwidth and can do with it what they please and I can’t argue with that. Some server admins go out of their way to ban all range requests; I’d never go that far, especially because I think server admins have a part to play in this also (say, by not using bloated pigs such as Apache that require them to impose connection and/or bandwidth limits in the first place), but I do think it’s important for people who use download accelerators to understand that they are using a workaround to take bandwidth by force, in effect cheating TCP into being less sensitive to congestion. This could never be regarded as a good thing, except by the end user for whom the transfer rates are increased at the expense of dominating the link. If you use a download manager, please try very hard not to use more connections than are really necessary to achieve reasonable speeds. On behalf of operators everywhere, thank you.
Then again, BitTorrent does the very same thing, and has much more destructive congestion potential for the networks, although to be fair it does involve multiple peers over potentially multiple paths. Hands up if you haven’t use BitTorrent. :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
