Hello,

Is WGET slow for you ? Did you tried increasing TCP Buffer and still not having the results you expect for downloads ? Do you need resume and multi connection functionality ? The solution is Axel

In Windows we have many download manager softwares that let us download with the maximized speed and resume ability but with Linux there are a few based on CLI as the most are with GUI.

Axel Installation :

Here we are going to install Axel and then explain how to use it.

– Debian Based Distro : If you’re on a Debian Based distributions like Ubuntu you can install Axel easily with apt-get .

apt-get install axel

– Redhat Based Distro : Axel is not included in Yum repository by default if you don’t have EPEL / Remo so you need to install it from scratch via source code or use RPMs which is faster and more easy.

rpm -ivh http://pkgs.repoforge.org/axel/axel-2.4-1.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm

Command-Line Switches :

You can have a complete list of command lines if you do “man axel” or “axel –help” but here we mention a few of usable command lines for general usages.

--max-speed=x           -s x    Specify maximum speed (bytes per second)
--num-connections=x     -n x    Specify maximum number of connections
--output=f              -o f    Specify local output file
--header=x              -H x    Add header string
--user-agent=x          -U x    Set user agent
--no-proxy              -N      Just don't use any proxy server
--quiet                 -q      Leave stdout alone
--verbose               -v      More status information

Examples :
– Downloads with max number of connections set to 10
axel -n 10 http://cachefly.cachefly.net/200mb.test

– Downloads at 512,000 Bytes/second (500KB/s) and max 10 connections
axel -s 512000 -n 10 http://cachefly.cachefly.net/200mb.test

Generally you can see about %88 percentage improvement in download speeds with Axel than Wget .

Hope this article was clear and usable for you.

Let me know your opinions in comment.

Thanks.