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Mysteriously, our connection is now very slow (10 KiB/s),
so it takes a very long time to download large files (>= 900 MB).

I'm searching for an online service that will:

  1. Download the original file (given an URL)
  2. Compress it (using GZIP, 7Z, RAR, PAQ, etc.)
  3. Send me a link to a compressed file.
    This way, I can download the compressed file and unzip it.

I tried that with my own VPS and it saves me hours of downloading. Are there any online services that will do this easily?

afrazier
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Alba Mendez
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  • That mysteriously slow link should be investigated ! – Shadok Dec 20 '11 at 19:56
  • Yeah I know. But as we live in the outskirts, ISPs don't pay much attention to us. We usually had about 100 KiB/s, but one day the link stopped working. I've managed to get it back with a _custom_ router, but it seems the ADSL line is **very** noisy (and slow) now. We think it's a broken cable. _We have called our ISP more than 8 times!_ – Alba Mendez Dec 23 '11 at 11:58

3 Answers3

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Most web-servers today implement the gzip compression on the data stream. Perhaps your remote web-server doesn't have that turned on?

Compressing files prior to sending them across the wire will yield little/no improvements on the actual amount of the data going over the wire. Rather than trying to transfer 900mb ... it'd probably be smarter to look at what you're transferring and perhaps look at programs capable of transferring "deltas" rather than the full contents of the files. (transfer what changed vs transferring 100% every time)

I know of no web-services that will do this for you on-the-fly.

TheCompWiz
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  • I think there are no deltas here. I'm trying to download an ISO of 800 MiB. I don't have any part of the file downloaded yet. So I want someone (with faster connection) to download the file first, and compress it so I have to download less. – Alba Mendez Dec 20 '11 at 18:00
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I think that what you really need to do is figure out why your connection is unusually slow. Get in contact with your ISP if you must.

Beyond that, I'm not aware of any services that do what you ask, and most software distributed online is already compressed. In your particular example of an ISO, most of the time the ISO's contents are already compressed, so compressing them further saves very little space. However, this is highly dependent on the ISO's contents.

afrazier
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1

Try Opera Turbo. It is an online service provided by Opera. You can only use it through the Opera browser but it has been around a while and works fine.

Tomas Andrle
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