Faster downloading on slow computers with fast connections

[PvL]

Most of my downloading I do on my relativly slow laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000, which has a 1.7 Ghz CPU and 1 Gb memory).
Meanwhile I have a fast connection - I download roughly 2 megabyte per second, I download a DVD4 in about 40 minutes or less.

Now I noticed, Alt.Binz slows down alot when decrypting, par-checking and unraring.
I suspect this slowdown is due to increased I/O, something my little laptop can't handle very well.

I did some expiriments, and noticed a few things (also based on my experience as a lead-developer for a database-like client-server business application, also written in Delphi btw - but I digress) :

- Handling one single I/O-heavy task (like unrar) is better done in another process (read: application), than in-process. This is because a new process has it's own full space of virtual-memory. (And it also prevents fragmentation in the calling application.)

- QuickPar seems faster in repairing damages file-sets, than the build-in repair-engine in Alt.Binz (might have something to do with my previous point)

So, in this scenario, Alt.Binz could measure I/O throughput. Based on these measurements (or first maybe just using a option/switch) it could decide to pause downloading temporarily, while doing local I/O - This way improving global throughput.

My hope is this will speedup the downloads even more!
What do you think?

[freeop]

I am not seeing this. I do notice that my computer bogs down somewhat when Alt.Binz is working on the files, but the speed of the downloads hardly changes at all while the processes are running.

I have a older system also. Somewhat like your notebook (Homebrew 1.8Ghz CPU and 1 Gb memory) my system does slow down disk access and possibly other applications when trying to run them at the same time. But as I said, my download speeds never changes. I have a 6 mbs DSL line and I am getting a steady 5 to 5.5 mbs with Alt.Binz.

Not for sure how that could be improved as for download speed. But maybe I am missing something in your request.

[PvL]

It's not the speed of downloading, per-se that slows down : It's the speed of decrypting, repairing and unraring that improves when I manually pause the download.

Slower connections won't notice this effect to much, but when Alt.Binz has to handle 24 mbps (as I have) or more, it really bogs the other I/O down...

[freeop]

Ah ok. That makes more sense. I would probably never see that with my DSL speed then, and as you said the processing within the computer DOES happen on my system.

I just didn't understand the speed until you brought that up.

So, as for my previous post, as the Church Lady would say:

"Never Mind"

 :oops:

[PvL]

Well, I too have to shut up - now that I've seen the improvements Rdl made since 0.25.0 (the version I was using up until now) :
Version 0.25.6 really flies - par2-checking is nearly instantaneous now (!)

[Rdl]

This one should be ok now with caching implemented.