jakecoffman/concurrent_download_challenge

Concurrent Download Challenge is a coding exercise built in the Go programming language. The project sets up a straightforward task: fetch several well-known websites, measure how large each page is, and report how long each download took. It is essentially a timed scavenger hunt for web pages. The specific goal is to download Google, Python.org, Ruby-Lang.org, and Golang.org. For each site, the program outputs the web address, the size of the page in bytes, and the time it took to retrieve. There is a hard time limit involved: if fetching all the pages takes longer than half a second, the program stops and abandons the remaining downloads. At the very end, it prints the total time that has passed since the program started running. This project is aimed at programmers learning how to handle multiple tasks at the same time, a concept known as concurrent programming. Fetching four websites one after another would be slow, because the program would wait for the first site to finish downloading before even asking for the second. By using concurrency, a developer can attempt to fetch all four sites simultaneously. The half-second time limit adds a layer of pressure, forcing the programmer to ensure their solution is not only functional but genuinely fast. The repository serves as a practical test for writing efficient code. The notable constraint is that the solution must gracefully handle the half-second deadline. If a particular website is slow to respond, the program needs to recognize the time limit has been exceeded, stop waiting, and still output the total elapsed time without crashing or hanging indefinitely.