[Sesse__]

There's already a variant of this from the receiver side, the so-called “download accelerators”. I've seen some of those literally open hundreds of connections for the same file until the server was full (hit its MaxServers limit), and when the server started sending 503 Too Busy, they would retry every 10 milliseconds. Several of them would mask their user agent. When I asked a user (unrelated to that specific program) about why they'd use something like this, their answer was “I've paid for 50 Mbit/sec, I will have 50 Mbit/sec”.

I can tell you, hosting files in such an environment and trying to work from the same machine is not a pleasant experience.

[phh]

Funny thing is, I used to (and still sometime do) host on a webserver with HDD storage. The users using such downloaders were DoSing themselves and got less than a tenth of a sequential download.

[Sesse__]

The dataset here is 17 TB+, so HDD storage is the only thing that's economically viable, especially for a service hosted as a hobby. :-) It doesn't really help that they DoS themselves, they still do it.

(After I limited connections to one per IP address, 90% of the problems went away. After I started blackholing users ignoring 503 responses, the remaining 10% were solved. I get the occasional “I didn't knooow, please give me access again” email now and then.)