Recently, I needed to do an update of Xilinx WebPack, mind you, this is one hefty piece of software. It weighs in at 6gigs, which definitely isn't "quick" on any internet I've ever had available to me.

So, when I went to download it(using Firefox of course), I was very... unsettled by the fact that the download was only going at 110kByte/s. My internet connection is capable of about 2200kByte/s download, so what gives!? My workaround in the past for this issue has been to take the link to my Linode linux server and download it there with wget, where the download will zip along at 14MByte/s, and then either copying it to my website directory and downloading it that way through HTTP, or using sftp. Both ways work about as well and will sufficiently max out my connection.

However, I recently figured out the missing variable. I tried doing the download locally with wget and was able to max out my connection!

TL;DR; Now, my question. Why is wget so much faster than firefox at downloading this file? I hardly ever have such a difference in download speeds except for with this one file.