You can turn on parallel downloading in the Chrome browser, so it will significantly reduce the time it spends on big files. A huge file will download faster if you split it into smaller parts. This is what the new Parallel Download feature in Google Chrome does.
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It is obvious that several factors affect the maximum speed of downloading files from the Internet. It is often limited by the data plan of the ISP and the server speed where the file is stored. However, the file size also plays an important role.
So Chrome developers have optimized this process. When a user clicks the file link, the browser checks to see if the server supports parallel downloads. If it is supported, Chrome then splits the file into multiple smaller parts and makes several connections to the server. Simply speaking, it will use one connection per part of the file. Once all the fragments have been downloaded, Chrome combines them back into a single file. This way, it is not only downloads faster but also uses the available bandwidth more efficiently. The procedure is totally transparent for the user.
By default, this feature is disabled, but it is easy to enable it with a special flag.
Enable Parallel Downloading in Chrome
To make Chrome use parallel downloads, do the following.
- Open a new tab in Google Chrome (Ctrl + T), and type
chrome://flagsin the address box. - On the Experiments page that opens, type parallel download in the search box.
- Look for the Parallel Downloading option in the search results, and select Enabled from the drop-down list to the right of its name.
- Finally, restart the browser using the Relauch button.
That's it.
At a glace, the feature is stable enough for daily use. It doesn't crash the browser and doesn't create broken files in our tests.
As of the speed improvements, Chrome downloads files faster approximately by 3 seconds for each 350 MB of the file. Obviously, you should take into account the server, connection quality and hardware, so on your end the result may be totally different.
Finally, splitting and combining the file will require some resources, and it may depend on your CPU and disk performance. On high-end devices this will work much faster than on some budget device. Also, huge files of several GB in size may require more RAM.
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