On 31 Jan 2002 at 8:41, Bruce BrackBill wrote: > The problem is, that my web pages are served up by php > and the content lengh is not defined. So as the manual states > I use --ignore-length. But when wget retrieves an image > it slows right down, possibly because it is ignoring > the content-length. Maybe an option to ignore the > content length of certain file types ( say text/html ) > would be an option for upcomming releases of wget.
The problem is that wget uses persistent connections by default if the server supports them. As you are using --ignore-length, wget must wait for more data will arrive while the connection is open. The persistent connection is closed by the server after a timeout - as far as it is concerned, it has already completed the request and is waiting for a new request to re-use the same connection. This timeout is what is causing the delays you are seeing. You can tell wget not to allow persistent connections using the --no-http-keep-alive option, which should speed things up in your case. By the way, have you tried it without the --ignore-length option to see if it works? Perhaps the manual ought to mention the undesirability of using --ignore-length with persistent connections.
