I was working on a puppet module that downloads a file of size over 3GB, unzips it and update database.Puppet master setup is on CentOS 6.8 and agent running on Windows 2012R2. I used nginx to serve files. As usual, I used puppet protocol to download file.

This setup was working as expected. The whole process use to complet in about 50 minutes.

After few days, I received a file size of 5GB. For this size, may times, puppet was failing to download it. I started evaluating best available tools. First in the list was powershell’s curl. Curl was better but not quite satisfactory. While looking for some of the better utilities, I stumbled upon MicroSoft’s new utility called ‘Start-BitsTransfer’. Its syntax is very simple and easy to use. Syntax:

D:> Start-BitsTransfer -Source “http://server.localtion/file.txt” \ -Destination “D:\install_folder\file.txt”

With Start-BitsTransfer download time has come down to 4 minutes. I am now using Start-BitsTransfer extensively to improve download times. Well Done Microsoft.