> The first is that we use Aria2 to handle FTP duties. Earlier versions of the script used other FTP clients that were either slow as molasses or painful to use. After some trial and error, I found Aria2 did the job better than lftp (which is fast but fussy) or good old ftp (which is both slow and fussy). I also found some incantations that took download times from roughly an hour to less than 20 minutes.

Tangential question: is it possible to use wget for ftp duties? Though may be additional FTP-specific functionality in `aria2c` of course:

https://serverfault.com/questions/25199/using-wget-to-recurs...