[Bug-wget] Support for long-haul high-bandwidth links

[Andrew Daviel]

When downloading a large file over a high-latency (e.g. long physical 
distance) high-bandwidth link, the download time is dominated by the 
round-trip time for TCP handshakes.

In the past tools such as bbftp have mitigated this effect by using 
multiple streams, but required both a special server and client.

Using the "range" header in HTTP/1.1, it is possible to start multiple 
simultaneous requests for different portions of a file using a standard 
Apache server, and achieve a significant speedup.
I have a proof-of-principle Perl script using threads which was able to 
download a medium-sized file from Europe to Vancouver in half the normal 
time.

I wondered it this was of interest as an enhanscement for wget.

regards
--
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada