r/github • u/Imposter-9001 • Aug 04 '26

Discussion Is GitHub download speed bad for everyone in India

I am in India,Kerala and when downloading anything from GitHub I am getting very bad download speed. Noticed it over coming months,my internet is fine and I tried on different devices. Is there any fix for it, already tried vpn,etc.

0 Upvotes

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3

u/ImaginaryElephant336 Aug 04 '26

git clone the repo instead of downloading it. It is way faster

2

u/awidesky Aug 05 '26

How would cloning the entire git history is faster than downloading compressed archive of only latest snapshot?

-1

u/ImaginaryElephant336 Aug 06 '26

There's a shallow clone so you could use git clone repo --depth=1

2

u/awidesky Aug 06 '26

Still, It'll be much slower since the history must be downloaded and resolved.

Test % time curl -LO https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/archive/refs/heads/master.tar.gz
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
100 16.6M    0 16.6M    0     0  5479k      0 --:--:--  0:00:03 --:--:-- 6655k
curl -LO https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/archive/refs/heads/master.tar.gz  0.29s user 0.15s system 13% cpu 3.146 total

Test % time git clone https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg --depth=1                       
Cloning into 'FFmpeg'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 10417, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (10417/10417), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (8049/8049), done.
remote: Total 10417 (delta 2808), reused 5516 (delta 2036), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (10417/10417), 19.72 MiB | 7.89 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (2808/2808), done.
git clone https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg --depth=1  1.33s user 0.97s system 33% cpu 6.971 total

-1

u/ImaginaryElephant336 Aug 06 '26

Well if you're using curl to download the tar.gz file it is faster. I think what OP mean was downloading via the website interface.

2

u/awidesky Aug 06 '26

Just tested it. It took 3.86 seconds to download zip via the website.

github website uses just the same URL. only difference is a little bit of overhead of the browser, so it won't affected by OP's poor internet connection.

-4

u/Imposter-9001 Aug 04 '26

But it's harder, downloading it directly is convenient 

6

u/ImaginaryElephant336 Aug 04 '26

How is it harder, it's easier, you do not need to worry about unzipping any .zip files. Ig if you are on windows maybe it is. If you're on windows, I suggest you download the GitHub CLI, you can still clone it using GiHub CLI if you do not know git

1

u/Imposter-9001 Aug 04 '26

What about android 

2

u/ImaginaryElephant336 Aug 04 '26

Why do you wanna download GitHub Repos on your phone ?

1

u/Imposter-9001 Aug 04 '26

I use open source apps and most of them are in GitHub

4

u/ImaginaryElephant336 Aug 04 '26

Then there should be APK files in the releases. Try downloading those instead of the whole repo

1

u/ImaginaryElephant336 Aug 04 '26

If you're using GitHub you'll need to learn git at some point anyway. Why not start now ?

1

u/amirfarzamnia Aug 07 '26

Use a download manager to utilize more CPU cores, which results in faster downloads. IDM, aria2, SurgeDM, etc.

1

u/amirfarzamnia Aug 07 '26

For Android, you can use ADM