RutSum

Download Manager For KDE - KGet

I found myself in need for a download manager, after about 11 months. I thought Bittorrent had everything I needed. Turned out I was wrong. I wanted to download the graphic novels for Heroes, which are available in the PDF format on the NBC website. The problem was that there were 72 of them, and the speed was being limited to 30 Kbps.

I thought KGet would come to my help. I was wrong again. KGet is a fully functional download manager, but very buggy and poorly written. By default, the maximum number of connections was set to 2. To change it and apply the settings, I had to restart KGet. After restarting, I started queuing files for download. I noticed the heat sink fan had started making a lot of noise. KSysGuard told me that KGet was using 100% of my CPU, with just about 11 files downloading simultaneously at about 20 Kbps each.

Though KGet was able to push my connection’s bandwidth to it’s limit, I was disappointed by it’s overall performance. Features are present, but the implementation is bad. And it hogs up too much of processor power. Moreover, it choked my connection completely. All that I could do while it was running was chat using Pidgin. I couldn’t open any sites.

If a smart bandwidth distributor were integrated with it, and the CPU usage cut down, KGet would be much better. And of course, user friendly menus must be added in the next release.

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