Comment by dathinab
5 years ago
Range headers are a pretty standard tools to e.g. continue interrupted downloads and similar.
Any well designed system, especially if it has static sources and is server cached should support it.
Surprisingly many web-frameworks don't support it out of the box, or don't support it well.
Either way gh-pages are static content and probably with some server side regional caches, so I'm not surprised it works.
Range headers are also how DownloadThemAll works.
If you're pulling a single TCP stream across a crowded network, you get maybe 1/40th of the available bandwidth. If you do four range requests instead, you might see >3/40th of the bandwidth.
This place we were contracting at, the managers were widely rumored to stream sports games at their desks, and our release cycle happened to fall on a game day. My poor coworker was downloading our installer every week, and the ETA was over 40 minutes. "Are you using DTA?" "No, what's that?" <fiddle fiddle> ETA: 12 minutes.
12 minute pauses in the middle of a manual process are a lot easier to stomach than 40 minutes. Especially if something goes wrong and you have to do it twice.