James Ross, on 04 August 2017 - 11:50 AM, said:
Whatever it was seems to have vanished. Updates for the last few months have been quick and reliable.
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DownThemAll (a Firefox extension) usually works well. Where it doesn't, one of two situations usually seems to be present: 1) there's some kind of redirect going on when the download starts that DTA can't follow, causing an immediate fail; and 2) there's a limit on the number of connections that requires reconfiguration of DTA for fewer connections than normal.
That said, the most common failure when downloading OR, using DTA or "straight," is a download that proceeds normally to 80-90% then stalls, and eventually times out - which doesn't happen on any other web site I've downloaded things from. And once it dies I can't restart from that point - it always restarts from scratch.
It doesn't always fail. That's the crazy thing. I can try 10 times and it'll work 2-3 times with DTA, 6-8 times when done "straight," without me doing anything different.
Yes, in principle, accelerators aren't needed any more. In practice, though, I've found that (maybe it's just my 2nd- if not 3rd-world ISP and connection aka AT&T) a single stream doesn't saturate my connection. While it may peak at 7 or 8 mbit, it varies all over the place with an average closer to 3. Using 2-4 simultaneous connections saturates the line and gets the download over with more quickly, and usually more reliably.