Axel
Axel tries to accelerate downloads by using multiple connections (possibly to multiple servers) for one download. Because of its size, it might be very useful on bootdisks or other small systems as a wget replacement.
| Tags | Internet Web |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
| Operating Systems | POSIX BSD Linux |
| Implementation | C |
Recent releases
- 27 Apr 2009 14:31
Release Notes: A buffer overflow caused by wrong size limits when copying strings was fixed. Thread hangups due to incorrect synchronization were fixed. The Fedora packaging file was removed. Axel will be available in the Fedora repositories soon. /etc/ is used instead of /usr/etc/ as the default system-wide configuration location. The CFLAGS environment variable is respected in the configure script. Special characters are allowed in arguments to the configure script. A MimeType entry was added and the Categories entry was fixed in the desktop file.
- 12 Jan 2009 07:50
Release Notes: Multiple bugs were fixed in large file support. A new Chinese translation and Chinese manpage were added.
- 12 Jan 2009 05:51
Release Notes: This release fixes a buffer overflow.
- 12 Sep 2008 13:08
Release Notes: This release adds a new RPM spec file, custom header support, a fix for a segfault related to the -H option, honoring of http_proxy and preferring it over HTTP_PROXY, large file support, and a new Russian translation.
- 17 Apr 2008 11:30
Release Notes: A crash was prevented and an error is raised instead if FTP CWD fails. A crash on long URLs was prevented and the maximum URL length was increased to 1024. Segfaults on HTTP 404 and 401 responses were fixed. strncpy is now used instead of strcpy for length-sensitive copies. The -g compilation switch is always used, and -O3 is disabled. The German translation was updated. The axel.1 and axel-kapt.1 man pages were updated. Compilation on GNU/kFreeBSD was fixed. Simple pop-ups are now displayed for the Help and Bug Report buttons.
Recent comments
Flashgot extension for firefox has better support for axel (including cookies, referer etc.) starting from version 1.2.8 and newer.
http://flashgot.net/
This is a pretty solid way to enable cookies for the original version axel provided by this project.
As far as unofficial development of axel goes, you can checkout this github page https://github.com/emiraga/axel for some added extra features.
It's me again, this time with another patch. Cookies don't work well, but i think this is better.
By using multiple threads axel is really fast in the beginning but it becomes slow near the end of downloading. This is because some threads have already finished, while others are bit slower. This patch will reactivate threads to divide parts of file that are left.
http://emiraga.wikispaces.com/Axel+Thread+Reactivation+Patch
Enjoy
Here is a buggy patch for loading cookies from Firefox 3
http://emiraga.wikispaces.com/Axel+Firefox+3+Cookies+Patch
Hope it works and that you will like it.
Hiding password to users
Here is a way to hide the password to other users on the same server with axel when downloading a file from an ftp account.
Just type this kind of command:
echo ftp://user:password@ftp.server.org/myfilename |axel -n 5 -
(note the trailing dash '-' at the end of the axel command, else it won't work).
This will pipe the command to the axel stdin, and doing this, the password isn't showed in a 'ps' command. Thus you should always use this kind of commands if you are downloading from a server with many users.
Enjoy!
Daniel
Incredibly fast !!!
This Axel download accelerator for linux is simply absolutely great!
I get much faster connexions with this than with wget.
Here is what I get on my side (for the same file, same server, same computer client):
wget: 238 Kbytes/s
axel: 686 Kbytes/s
This is almost times faster..
It is normal due to the fact that it triggers several connections on the same file, rather than only one connection.
Almost all connections are limited to about 100-200 Kbytes, I don't know where this limitation comes from, but I realised this already with other downloaders.
This is why Axel is so important if you want very fast downloads! (I have to download 5Gbytes of data regularily and it decreases the time from 6 to 2 hours).
Also, with the new fast private connections of up to 15Mbits/s or more, axel will become even more important, because the limit will probably still stay at 240kbytes/s with wget, as it will go well over 1500kbytes/sec with Axel!!
Also, wget will NEVER add several simultaneous downloads as with axel, because they told me this directly.
Therefore, I can only recommend this software and it's continuation. Congratulations to Wilmer!
Daniel
