Hi William,
I'll keep your insighful comments in mind when I'm updating a mirror.
Which I wasn't ;)

> What you're seeing is the turn around time to the
> server and that dominates the download for small
> files.

Er... Then what I'm seeing is a small turn around time to the server, since
the mirror starts with lots of 8k files and achieves 8kb/s with just 1 socket
and 1 connection per second.

Hey, I think I can come up with a nicely small recap of my previous message.

Default max transfer rate => corrupted files
No (very high) transfer rate => good files
Good files AND no DOS attack => erratic transfer rate
Default behaviour is perhaps not well chosen

For the record I first tried 2 sockets and 3 connections/s, which was nice for
the first batch of small 8k files, then httrack went on to a bunch of 100k
files, transfer rate went to 200–250 kb/s and I quickly stopped that.