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I've had certain instances of downloading from websites (right now I'm downloading the latest version of Ubuntu from virginmedia.com) where the speed of the download gradually increases (increasing by a few kilobytes in speed per second). Is there any sort of reasoning behind this?

For example, when my download started with virginmedia.com, it started at about 900 Kilobytes per second. When the download finished, I was downloading at about 10 Megabytes per second.

sysadmin1138
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Zack Zatkin-Gold
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1 Answers1

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One common point for this is TCP slow start. One might expect this to kick up faster than that, but latency is a possible reason for why the increase is relatively slow. Other potential reasons include the server's load changing, the file priming into memory and off disk, etc.

All-in-all, there's no concrete answer I can give, but those are the directions to look.

Jeff Ferland
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