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Free Download Manager site redirected Linux users to malware for years
(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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FDM does some clever things to boost download speeds. It splits up a download into different chuncks, and somehow downloads them concurrently. It makes a big difference for large files (for example, Linux ISOs).
It only makes a difference if the server is capping the speed per connection. If it's not then it will not make a difference.
I guess many servers are capping speeds them. Makes sense since I almost never see downloads actually take advantage of my Gigabit internet speeds.
It's interesting to me people still download things in that fashion. What are you downloading?
I occasionally download something from a web server, but not enough to care about using a download manager that might make it marginally faster. Most larger files I'm downloading are either TV shows and movies from torrents and usenet, or games on steam. All of which will easily saturate a 1Gbps connection.
Im curious as to how it would achieve that?
It can’t split a file before it has the file. And all downloads are split up. They’re called packets.
Not saying it doesn’t do it, just wondering how.
It could make multiple requests to the server, asking each request to resume starting at a certain byte.
Interesting.
I feel I’ll save this rabbit hole for weekend and go and have a look at what they do.
The key thing to know is that a client can do an HTTP
HEADrequest to get just theContent-Lengthof the file, and then performGETrequests with theRangerequest header to fetch a specific chunk of a file.This mechanism was introduced in HTTP 1.1 (byte-serving).
Huh.. that’s super interesting and thanks for sharing.