[GRLUG] download slowdown

[Michael Mol]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Eric Beversluis
<ebever at researchintegration.org> wrote:
> Last night I was downloading a Win7 DVD image from MSDN. It took about 7
> + hours for ca 2.3GB.
>
> Speakeasy.net download speed showed ca 1.94MBps or ca 264KBps. Yet the
> download manager was grinding along at about 60KBps.

Were these two separate Speakeasy measurements? That's some
significant variance.

Do you know what your network connection is billed as? Is it DSL,
cable or satellite?

>
> I switched to an Ethernet cable from the wireless, thinking maybe the
> wireless encrypting was slowing things down, but that still only gave me
> about 100KBps.
>
> So I'm wondering where the slowdown was coming:
> --Speakeasy's measure of download speed was wrong?
> --the download manager somehow choked the process?

Possible. What were you using for a download manager?

> --the Belkin router somehow choked the process?

Plausible; Belkin is Best Buy's off-brand. I have one of their
routers, plugged it in for a few days, and then ripped the thing out
because it had a high squeal somewhere north of 16 KHz that varied
based on how many of its ports I had devices plugged in to.

> --the M$ site was only sending data out at the slow speed?

Not likely, especially if you were downloading from MSDN without
trying anything weird. I've downloaded ISOs from them from Firefox on
Linux before. Heck, I've downloaded ISOs from them using wget, with no
problem.

> --something else in the Internet was slowing down the data flow?

These last couple days, DSL might show weird behaviors from the
weather. Cable might show huge variances in throughput based on
crowding from a lot of people being home for the snow storm and
crowding the local loop with streaming video and video games.

(OK, I've really got nothing against Windows, but I can't resist
making the crack: Windows is so slow, even *downloading* it is slow.)

-- 
:wq

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