Does anyone know of a portable app that can discover what links on a web page contain download mirrors and test the speed of each?
I often downland huge DVD ISO's of Open Source projects.
For example I am currently downloading Knoppix DVD v5.3.1 and it is about 4241 MB.
I'm downloading it via FDM Portable v2.6 BETA Build 792. At 12 sections at 173 KB/s
it will still take over 7 hours. I know the system here can download much much faster since I once did a BitTorrent download of the CD ISO version of FreeBSD at over 600-650 KB/s. Each of the three CD sized downloads only took an average of 22-30 minutes.
There will be some SF mirrors that are faster than others for you. You can usually find them and pick them and SF will remember your choice. But, ultimately, a torrent would be faster for a file of that size if enough people are sharing it. HTTP connections from mirrors are usually limited to a maximum bandwidth per connection as well as limiting the number of download connections per user to prevent users from consuming more bandwidth than they should and slowing others down. With a torrent, you're download bits from a dozen or more hosts at once with it auto-selecting whichever ones are fastest. In the case of Knoppix, you should use torrent for that, too.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!