download speed doesn't reflect actual speed?

[jhv]

i do a speed test about once a week and hover around 20 down; i'm curious as to why when i go and download an album (say it's 70mb), i only download at like 1mbps. why doesn't that 20 down apply to actual downloads? is there anything i can do to 'fix' this? thanks in advance for any insight

[FStop7]

Are you only getting 1mpbs from all sites you download from, or are you trying the same site? That's definitely way off.

I have a 20mb connection which gets an average throughput of around 17.2mb on speedtest.

When I download something from a fast site my downloads run at a max of 2 megabytes per second. For example, I pulled down BF Bad Company 2, a 5.3 gig file, off of Steam in about 35 minutes.

[jhv]

Originally Posted by FStop7

Are you only getting 1mpbs from all sites you download from, or are you trying the same site? That's definitely way off.

I have a 20mb connection which gets an average throughput of around 17.2mb on speedtest.

When I download something from a fast site my downloads run at a max of 2 megabytes per second. For example, I pulled down BF Bad Company 2, a 5.3 gig file, off of Steam in about 35 minutes.

i really only download MU links. i'll see if it's the same for other sites as well

[Kensta335]

It's 20m/bits per second. Not byte. You should be downloading faster though. Probably closer to 2 mega bytes per second.

[jopa489]

Run a real speedtest. Your download speed is only as fast as the source(s) can push.

[bluespeed117]

its not your internet thats slow, the servers that you are downloading off of set an upload limit which is probably why you arent reaching the download speed you are reporting.

[jhv]

ah, i see, thanks for the info everyone! it isn't a huge inconvenience, i'll finish an album in a minute or two. i was just curious

[DougLikesBMW]

Don't worry, I asked my dad the same thing the other day. Had no clue how it worked. You only get that 20mb/s inside of your ISP's network.

Verizon upgraded our internet today for $40 less, fucking win.

35up/35down...was getting 4mb/s today, downloaded a 2gig file in 6 minutes.

I am so excite, plus they gave us more HD channels.

Verizon cannot be beat...well until Google comes out with their gigabit fiber.

[radix]

Originally Posted by jh valley

i do a speed test about once a week and hover around 20 down; i'm curious as to why when i go and download an album (say it's 70mb), i only download at like 1mbps. why doesn't that 20 down apply to actual downloads? is there anything i can do to 'fix' this? thanks in advance for any insight

You can throw speedtest.net out the window for the most part. If you get 20Mbit/s that translates to 2.5MiB/s. Also keep in mind that if you have comcast powerboost or the equivalent, speedtest is largely going to be tricked by powerboost. Powerboost only applies to the first 10MiB or so.

http://customer.comcast.com/Pages/FA...4-051cd5feacf0

Below is a tcpdump of a session with speedtest.net.

osx ~ % uname -a
Darwin osx 9.8.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.8.0: Wed Jul 15 16:55:01 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1228.15.4~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
osx ~ % sudo tcpdump -w tcpdump.en1 -i en1             
Password:
tcpdump: listening on en1, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes
18048 packets captured
18052 packets received by filter
0 packets dropped by kernel

Note that no packets were dropped. Almost all the packets were sent/received from port 9091 (xmltec-xmlmail according to /etc/services) remotely to my machine port 55622/55623. The total transfer size was approximately 15.5MiB for the download part.

osx ~ % tcpdump -r tcpdump.en1 | perl -nle '$i += $1 if /xmlmail > osx\.\d+: [SP.] \d+:\d+\((\d+)\)/; END { print $i / 1024**2 }'
reading from file tcpdump.en1, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet)
15.560188293457

Total time from start to finish for the download was ~10 seconds.

02:14:20.473769 IP 69.38.192.34.xmltec-xmlmail > osx.55622: S 2591463299:2591463299(0) ack 2223330138 win 5792 <mss 1
460,sackOK,timestamp 373354748 673080267,nop,wscale 0>

to

02:14:30.725108 IP 69.38.192.34.xmltec-xmlmail > osx.55622: . 8138151:8139599(1448) ack 5275 win 16080 <nop,nop,times
tamp 373355772 673080369>

The point is most of the speedtest.net download is covered by powerboost, so you don't get an accurate rate anyway. I also don't believe 15MiB is enough data to accurately measure sustained throughput.

[jhv]

goddammit andrew

[radix]

Originally Posted by jh valley

goddammit andrew

sowie. powerboost fucks speedtest results. not my fault.

[jhv]

[radix]

Originally Posted by Kensta335

It's 20m/bits per second. Not byte. You should be downloading faster though. Probably closer to 2 mega bytes per second.

To use your notation... 20m/bits per second is greater than 2 mega bytes per second, so I'm not sure what you mean. 20 / 8 = 2.5. You're right about needing to do the conversion though.

[mrgoochio]

20mbit connection is not a 20megabyte per second download speed as previously stated

[burberry]

there's a lot of different factors. i usually have decent speed at download mbps, but slow ass internet. =T