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What is the difference between curl and aria2? This post describes it as download engines, but does not elaborate further. Also, how would I know which of them would be faster?

pritmit
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    Is is not about "faster" but about features and the license (curl = MIT, aria is GPL) https://curl.haxx.se/docs/comparison-table.html The "faster" depends more on your connection and the server you get it from than on curl or aria2. One can be quicker than the other depending on what you do. Mind the "Parallel Downloads" options on aria2 though that curl does not have. – Rinzwind May 04 '18 at 14:31
  • Thanks for the ref, sums up nicely but I ask this risking to sound dangerously naive; how does the license affect its performance? and for serial downloads, what features of my connection would help me identify the better suited of the two? – pritmit May 04 '18 at 14:48
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    It does not. But some people swear by GPL (the 2 of us don't it seems ;-) ) "and for serial downloads, what features of my connection would help me identify the better suited of the two?" Try each of them? The connection I meant: connection to the download server. That one will likely block too many concurrent connections (at least our servers do ;-) ). – Rinzwind May 04 '18 at 14:58

2 Answers2

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They have a comparison table:

enter image description here

Source: curl - Comparison Table

Kulfy
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to quote https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2019/07/22/curl-goez-parallel/

"No same file splitting This functionality makes curl do URLs in parallel. It will still not download the same URL using multiple parallel transfers the way some other tools do. That might be something to implement and offer in a future fine tuning of this feature."

As far as I know, curl never added "same file splitting" to accelerate downloads. This is omitted from the comparison table and is a key feature present in aria2. For example, you can use -x 5 for faster downloads, e.g.

$ aria2c -x 5 URL

where:
-s N : use N connections to download (s for split), default 5
-x N : maximum number of connections per server for download, default 1


quoted from: http://tuxdiary.com/2013/08/16/axel-uget-linux-download-managers/
jjisnow
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