> I'm trying to mirror www.example.com and the transfer rate
> gets progressively slower with only 1 active connection. 
It
> feels like it's having problems parsing a file or 
retrieving
> links from it.

Are there many dynamically generated files on this site ? 
Such as .jsp pages ? In this case, ensure in 'Set 
Options' / 'Mime Types' that the correct mime is set to 
speedup the mirror

for example,
jsp <-> text/html