ARIA 2
Speed up downloads
Optimum use of internet bandwidth is Shashank Sharma’s life’s purpose. Thankfully, there are tools designed to help do just that.
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in New Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s been writing about open source software for 20 years and lawyering for 10.
When you’ve got a tool to grab torrents and your web browser has a download manager for W most other files, do you still need a dedicated download manager? Short answer, yes – use Aria2.
Aria2
is a lightweight, multi-protocol, multi-server and multi-source command-line download utility that can verify checksums and authentication certificates on the fly. Furthermore, it includes a fully featured BitTorrent client with support for DHT, PEX, encryption, magnet URIs, web seeding, selective downloads, local peer discovery and a UDP tracker. You can also throttle the bandwidth, so you can watch YouTube while downloading the latest release of your favourite distro.
While this might not be a deciding factor for modern multi-core multi-processor computing devices, CLI utilities like Aria2 are incredibly lightweight. And no matter how many GHz and cores your computer has, people are always put off by bloatware. And we’ve saved some of its more impressive features for last.
For one, Aria2 supports opening multiple connections to download the file even faster. But perhaps its niftiest feature is that it can download the same file at the same time using different protocols.