What is the advantage of FTP over HTTP?

[Cristatus]

I am downloading a 3.5 gig linux distro, and was wondering what the advantage is.

By the time i get an answer, i will probably be at around 500 mb.

 

[lansalot]

No major advantage I think. FTP is dedicated for file transfer so you might argue it may perform better, but at the end of the day unless you are on multi-gigabit networks you'll probably never notice the difference.

 

[spidey07]

the advantage is FTP is faster.

the application itself is tuned to move files the fastest and most reliable means necessary.

 

[jkoon]

I believe that it might be better optimized as spidey07 says, but for smaller files I like to use HTTP because ftp has more handshaking involved and seems to take longer to start.

 

[nick128]

HTTP is made to do text (Hyper-text transport protocol) granted it does all other files as well, but it's main purpose was to get HTML code from one place to another as quickly as possible. Ever notice in your FTP connection options how you can chose to download in binary or ASCII? Ever wonder why? welcome to FTP. Set your client to download in binary only and download an image. Then set it to download in ASCII only and download teh same image and see if it will open. Like he said above, it's made as a more general-purpose protocol to move finals quickly, but there's more setup time involved since it had to examine the file to determine what mode to download in, etc.

 

[Fardringle]

In my opionion, the biggest advantage of FTP is the ability (assuming the source server supports it) to resume interrupted downloads. This is particularly useful when downloading large files since you do not have to download the entire file over again if the transfer fails.

 

[Nothinman]

In my opionion, the biggest advantage of FTP is the ability (assuming the source server supports it) to resume interrupted downloads. This is particularly useful when downloading large files since you do not have to download the entire file over again if the transfer fails.

It's in the HTTP 1.1 spec as well as byte ranges.