Axel, FASTER MORE POWER! bye bye Wget

I was looking for a way to speed up my command line downloads. We do a lot of video and multimedia work at Alethia, and downloading, even on a fiber connection can be slow when you have to download a fair amount of video/image files. So in doing a search, I started to see "Axel" coming up in searches to replace the wget command.

If you do not have Axel installed:

$ sudo apt-get install axel

http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/axel

"Axel tries to accelerate the downloading process by using multiple connections for one file. It can also use multiple mirrors for one download. Axel tries to be as light as possible (25-30k in binary form), so it might be useful as a wget clone on byte-critical systems."

So here is a little test I did. I backed up one of my clients sites into a tar file. 417.6 mb file. Not so huge, but decent enough for a test. I then used:

$ axel http://DOMAIN.XOM/FILE.tgz

And off we went. Decently fast I had to say. I tracked the bandwidth coming down and it reached 1.5mb/s down at times and did not drop below 600KIB/s

You can limit the number of connects  " -n 3 " that would be 3 connections and limit the speed " -s 1000000 "  which I guess is done in kilobits. 

The same test with wget:

$ wget http://DOMAIN.XOM/FILE.tgz

Lets just say....night and day.  Speeds were much lower high spikes are 300KIB/s but it stayed pretty much around 100KIB/s. 

You can see that it took me a total of 19:10 mins vs Axel, which took 11:41 mins.  Clearly a big advantage to using axel from now on.