speed question

[Joe Clever]

Gregory,

I have a few observations, rather than an answer to your question.
Make sure everyone is clear about the units of measurement you are
reporting.  Often there is confusion over kilobytes per second and
kilobits per second. Windows applications often report in kilobytes
per second. Often you can not rely on the way they capitalize the
abbreviations for kilobits and kilobytes. This can lead to speeds
looking like they are off by a factor of ten or so.

There doesn't appear to be anything in your hardware that should limit
your speed, other than your ADSL cap. My router/firewall based on a
486DX100 with 10 Mbps ISA cards and running the 2.4.xx kernel, seems
to easily handle my 3 Mbps cable modem connection.

The speed test sites vary wildly in the numbers that they report. Your
bits are traversing a path that you have little control over, so there
can be any number of bottlenecks between your server and the test
server. You will get the most consistent and accurate results if you
can transfer a large file between one of your ISP's servers (hopefully
located nearby, with few hops) and your server.

If you are running PPPoE, that can have pretty severe overhead, from
what I have read.



-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca
[mailto:speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca] On Behalf Of Gregory Nowak
Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2004 5:08 PM
To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca
Subject: speed question


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Hi all.

I've been wondering about this for a while now, and thought I'd get
some input on it.

I'm on a ADSL connection, and my downstream speed is supposed to be
1536 KbpS, and my upstream is supposed to be 128 KbpS. My network
setup is
as follows. The ADSL modem is connected to my server which is a pIII
600 MHz, with 384 Mb of ram. Other machines on my LAN have access to
the internet via iptables on the server. My second ethernet interface
on the server is connected to a 100 MbpS switch, which all the other
boxes are connected to. All the network cards in all my boxes are 100
MbpS.

I've noticed that when downloading things with lynx the cat on my
server, the highest download speed I ever got was 170 Kbps, the lowest
was about 20 KbpS, but on average, download speeds are about 150
KbPs. Thinking that the speed should be higher, I ran a speed test at
dslspeedtest.com using my windblows box (the test didn't work with
lynx/links), with the windblows box connection going through the
switch, which is connected to the server machine. The test told me
that my speed is about 700 KbpS. I then plugged the ADSL modem
directly into the windblows box, made sure my ie cache was cleaned
out, and tried the test again. This time around, I was told my speed
was 1 MbpS.

My question is, with the downstream speed I mentioned earlier, should
I be able to get downloads on the machine connected to the ADSL modem
at 170 KbpS max, or should they be higher then that? Thanks.

Greg


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