It’s like you’re asking the server “Hey, could you download that PDF for me, please? Thanks!” A server (Google’s server or other servers) sends you a copy of that file you requested. You, the user, requests a file from a server. But what exactly happens during a download?Every download from the InternetĮvery download from the Internet goes through the same process. The click of a button gave you the information you needed.

How do we deal with snoopy individuals and/or companies who are watching us download? What are some tips to stay anonymous while downloading?īefore we answer these questions, let’s first ask the obvious: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I DOWNLOAD SOMETHING?Īs a computer user, you’ve probably downloaded something off the Internet by now. This is worse than your mom finding out about your downloads because hackers could steal your identity. If hackers work hard, they can see what you downloaded and when. The long answer? Some people you don’t want obtaining your private information. This is especially true for those downloading on torrents. Someone somewhere will find you, no matter how hard you try to protect and secure your online identity. Attaining optimal privacy is a lost cause. And the slowdowns are hard to handle too.Įdit2: Going from 200 to 400 connections doesn't apparently increase the download rate anymore, so I guess I'm hitting some other limit now.The Internet, for all its glory, has some drawbacks. As otherwise smoothen this out and get it even faster will just get impacted too hard by a single instance dying (returning http 500). I thinks this may be near the limit without specialized connection handling.

With 200 it's staggering between 5.0MiB and 10MiB, but will fall down to 1.6MiB's occasionally. (Currently ETA 50h, with theoretical ETA of 2.5h)Īlso privoxy will return a http 500 when the tor process behind it fails, which causes aria2 to immediately exit and the haproxy also detects that backend still as up.Įdit: Now recompiled aria2c to allow more than 16 connections ( ). Which however is still not saturating my maximum bandwidth of 30MiB/s.

The speed is now in between 200kiB/s and 2MiB/s. Than aria2 with the maximum of 16 connections for downloading. I now managed to get a significant performance increase by running 16 instances of tor mapped to one instance of privoxy each than haproxy in forward proxy mode with leastconn mode in front of it.

Tor download files