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How can I Speed up downloads?

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My downloading times have significantly slowed down over the past few days. What used to take no more than 20 minutes is now taking over 2 and a half hours. I have already disabled my add-ons and turned off my firewall. It isn't working.

My downloading times have significantly slowed down over the past few days. What used to take no more than 20 minutes is now taking over 2 and a half hours. I have already disabled my add-ons and turned off my firewall. It isn't working.

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Hey MGC121880,

There are a couple of things here that could be at play. First, have you noticed a slow down in overall internet speed? You should run a bandwidth test to see if your provider is just having issues with unusually heavy traffic. The other thing you might want to try is clearing the download list. If the list becomes too long, it can sometimes slow things down as Firefox has load the whole list.

If that doesn't work, I'd try starting Firefox in Diagnose Firefox issues using Troubleshoot Mode. If you don't have the issue while all of your add-ons, extensions, and themes are disabled, you can try adding them back in one by one until you find the culprit. You should look at the Extensions and Themes troubleshooting guide and the Troubleshoot issues with plugins like Flash or Java to fix common Firefox problems article as well.

You could also try Creating a new profile.

Hopefully this helps!

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Matt_G wrote:

You should run a bandwidth test to see if your provider is just having issues with unusually heavy traffic.

An example of a site hosting such a test is http://speedtest.net/

If you find there's nothing fixable after troubleshooting, you can try the DownThemAll extension. Your downloads will be faster, provided the server allows multiple connections (this is not the case for file hosts where you don't have a premium membership).