I an stuck with dial-up so I get to wondering…
If I had $7k per month to use for an fiber optic connection of 40M+ connection speed and a top of the line desktop puter, what would my real world connection be like?
Would I be able to download faster than the SDMB could deliver?
What is the average web site or message board server speed?
How much stuff or what kind of stuff would I still be sitting and waiting on?
Are * .gov * sites fast???
What is the average speed that will give the average home user all the download speed that one would expect for the condition of the internet and the average server bandwidth conditions as they exist today?
Is design of the web sites more critical then the bandwidth – on average?
How fast can Google earth download BIG pics if I have access to the big pipes during normal daily operations? Average traffic on their site? In the wee hours when there is little traffic if that even happens anymore?
We have ADSL2 which on average connects at about 11mbps. My download speed according to several speed checks I’ve done is somewhere around 600kbps and sometimes higher, but in general most sites where I download files from are usually limited to giving me approximately 50kbps.
A good real world check is to download a file from somewhere like Microsoft, where I once downloaded a 40mb game demo at a speed consistently over 650kbps. Took about a minute.
I think the deal with faster connections like you mentioned is more to do with the fact they are generally for business and are more designed to enable multiple users at the same time.
You don’t have to spend a fortune on fiber to have a connection that’s faster than a lot of webservers.
With my 6 meg DSL, it’s pretty easy to tell who’s got a fat, fast connection to the backbone and who’s getting along on a T1 (1.5 meg) connection.
Still seeking info about what would be needed to go as fast as the average web page or message board is capable of downloading …
How big a pipe and what specs on the computer?
Well, you’d need to be on a backbone. That is as fast as your are going to get. As far as the specs on the computer, IIRC the nics aren’t even close to maxing out the CPU, though I am not sure about the gigabit cards*. The slow spot is the connection, not the CPU. My little 3.2 gig P4 is probably good enough.
I worked in the NOC at AOL and it was insanely fast because we ran straight into the backbone. AOL cached a ton of pages because the servers serving the pages couldn’t keep up**.
Slee
- I’m a software guy, not a hardware guy. I don’t know jack about NICs except how to configure them. Here is a grain of salt, take it.
**I once recieved a call from the head network admin from Playboy. He was upset because AOL was caching their site and it was cutting down on his page views. It went up a couple levels then the word came down to stop caching the site. So we took it out of the cache. The Playboy head admin called within about a half hour asking to be put back in the cache because their severs were melting and couldn’t keep up. The dumb thing is that he could have put in a little javascript to get the actual hit count.
I don’t think anyone really knows what the average web server’s available bandwidth is. Obviously it’s going to depend partly on the time of day. Yahoo will probably have fewer people connecting to it during night time in the states than in the early evening. Even if you both have OC-92’s, you may only be able to get T-1 speeds out of them if they’re under heavy traffic.
I’ll tell you this much though. I’m on DSL with a not-exactly-enormous 768k downstream. I managed to get on a 3 megabit connection last week. Honestly, the difference for casual browsing was negligible. I think in either case, my browser took more time to render the page than it took to download it. It was nice for downloading movies, but when it comes to browsing, I’m happy with my 768k/256k. Rather than shooting for high bandwidth, I’d shoot for low latency.
As for CPU power, you’d need a hell of a connection to saturate your processor. On my 100 megabit LAN, the most I’ve ever managed was about 6 MB/s with my Thunderbird 850 Mhz. That’s not quite all the connection can handle, but it’s most of it. The bottleneck was actually my hard drive, not the processor. New computers could probably handle at least 20 MB/s and that’s assuming they have to read from or write to the hard drive. That’s well over OC-3 speed. So if you have gigabit ethernet, then a single computer probably won’t be able to keep up, but if your Internet connection is too fast for your computer’s capabilities, then either it’s past time to upgrade your computer or you spend way too much money on Internet service.
Ok… that is the kind of info I was looking for… Thanks…