Single Vs Multi Connection Speed Test Speed Test

I generated a giant file on my server. This resulted in a file large enough to be slow to download over my 100Mbit home connection: 2.9GB and took about 14 minutes to generate.

I then ran two tests. One with a single connection, and one with 5 parallel connections (using the nc command). The time difference between the start of the test and when it finished was minimal - I think my server just warmed up slightly during that time period. After that, both tests took about 6:30 minutes. This is because of the server, not so much because of downloading directly from my desktop.

Is Single Connection Faster Than The Multi Connection?

The single connection was almost 10 times faster than the multi-connection download.

At Digital Ocean, a single connection was only about 50% as fast as a multi-connection download. I think the results show that parallel connections do help when downloading from different servers. It seems that there is no real benefit to parallel connections when downloading from the same server over and over again, but using multiple sources might actually prove to be faster than just one source at times (at least for very large downloads).