Do http file downloads download byte sequentially?

So I have a couple GiB tgz archive I'm downloading from my server, I was wondering if Google Chrome is downloading the first byte, writing it, then moving onto the second byte or just getting random pieces.

Basically the file is taking forever and I used Split on the server side version (after I started downloading) to 开发者_如何学运维create 200MiB pieces. I really wanna know if I can take the partially downloaded file from Google Chrome and split it locally into the same sized pieces and just match up the pieces from the server that I need.

Try splitting the partially downloaded file and then compare local pieces with corresponding pieces on server by comparing their hashes. It seems to be easier than guessing how Chrome handles it.

Usually, browsers handle download sequentially. However, you can use add-on/extension download managers, I'm sure there are many for Chrome, too. These often will use multiple connections to load different parts of a file and are able to pause/resume downloads.

On the command line you could try mcurl:

"Multiple cURL" is a shell script to download files in multiple parts via cURL...

http://www.goforlinux.de/scripts/mcurl/