Axel instead of Wget for installer

[JJ Fullmer]

So just today I had the wonderfully frustrating experience of my internet being slowed down to 1/30th due to an isp problem right when I needed to update fog. Downloading inits, kernels, and the fog client takes a pretty annoyingly long time when you only have a 1 MB/s download speed.
So while I waited for it to finish downloading I looked for some sort of alternative or some sort of configuration that might make it go faster.
I came across a package called axel. Which is basically a multithreaded wget.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/axel.1.html
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/download-accelerator-for-linux-command-line-tools.html

I found that it installed easily on centos 7 with yum install -y axel and the documentation suggests it’s under the same name in apt-get.
The fog installer had finally finished by the time I found and installed this package, so I didn’t have a chance to test it in the installer. But maybe it’s worth a shot to add it into the install script instead of wget. I mean who doesn’t want to download things 4 times faster?

[ITSolutions]

This seems like a cool tool, but not sure that it would be a big help for most cases. This includes your particular issue, if your internet was slowed to 1mb on your end then having multiple channels pulling the same information wouldn’t make it any faster. This is more helpful when there is a bottle neck on the senders side where they can serve from multiple copies of the same files or am I missing something?

[JJ Fullmer]

@ITSolutions In my experience with trying these kinds of download accelerators it does help on slower connections. While your logic makes sense, since it speeds up a fast connection, why wouldn’t it speed up a slow connection in the same manner?

[MRCUR]

@Arrowhead-IT It speeds up a fast connection because there’s additional bandwidth to use that wouldn’t otherwise be used. On a 1Mb connection, that is not the issue - there simply isn’t any more bandwidth available to use.