Protocols and techniques

[forthrin]

1. Which protocols does it support?
2. By what specific methods does it achieve faster downloads than competing products?

[SuperCoolPencil]

1. Surge can download anything that your browser can. Although we do plan to implement more protocols like Bittorrent and m3u8 down the line.

2. A standard browser usually opens one HTTP connection to the server.
   A server usually limits the bandwidth it gives to a single connection to make it fair for all users

Download managers (like Surge) open up a lot of requests at once (32 in Surge). They use it to split the file into a lot of small parts and download those parts individually.

Now all connections are also not created equal, there are fast connections and slow connections. because of stuff like load balancers and CDN's and stuff.

Download managers have a bunch of ways to optimize these connections.
The top 3 optimizations we did in Surge are:

• Split the largest chunk whenever possible so we dont have idle workers
• Near the end, when fast workers are done and slow workers are still doing their work, make the fast idle workers "steal work" from the slow workers
• find the mean speed of all workers if there is a worker performing less than 0.3x of mean, restart it in the hopes that it will get a better pathway to the server which will be faster

Hope this answers your questions!

[forthrin]

Yes, it does. If the technique is not a USP, it's good transparency to include other utilities that utilize the same techniques in a comparison table, but show that with your utility, you get the best combined set of pros.

[SuperCoolPencil]

Yes that is a nice idea, although it would require a some research and time.

I was thinking of doing a writeup on everything we tried - what worked and what didnt....