Huge speed difference

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RamblingMan

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Hey, I was wondering if anyone knew how to fix this..

I have a 4mb line and have found that I seem to be restricted to round about 50Kb/s on some of my machines on my network. I haven't tried all of them thats why I say some.

I started to download Windows Vista from MS at about 50KB/s.
After getting fed up with the speed, I tried using my Gentoo Linux box to download from the same place. From there, i was getting an average speed of about 350KB/s!

The same applied when I was downloading VMware on another computer, except it was only downloading at 20KB/s while the linuxbox was cruising at 400KB/s

There must be some sort of interenet explorer option restricting it. Can anyone help?
 
FaTaL said:
Hey, I was wondering if anyone knew how to fix this..

I have a 4mb line and have found that I seem to be restricted to round about 50Kb/s on some of my machines on my network. I haven't tried all of them thats why I say some.

I started to download Windows Vista from MS at about 50KB/s.
After getting fed up with the speed, I tried using my Gentoo Linux box to download from the same place. From there, i was getting an average speed of about 350KB/s!

The same applied when I was downloading VMware on another computer, except it was only downloading at 20KB/s while the linuxbox was cruising at 400KB/s

There must be some sort of interenet explorer option restricting it. Can anyone help?
Click to expand...

check if your windows update is also trying to download stuff. i had a bad experience
 
Nah, definately not windows update. If it was that pumping the bandwidth, the linux box wouldnt download any faster.
 
FaTaL said:
Nah, definately not windows update. If it was that pumping the bandwidth, the linux box wouldnt download any faster.
Click to expand...

r u using download managers with multithread support for windows?
did u scan ur windows boxes for virii/adware/spyware/malware/trojans/zombies etc?(windows is more vulnerable to such)?
are background programs running that utilise the internet (skype/msn etc)?
 
The network I have is pretty secure.

The internet goes: Router->Hardware Firewall->Win2003 Server->Network

The Win2003 Server is running Symantec Corporate and WSUS. All the computers on the network have the latest windows updates and antivirus definitions, all scanned weekly. No background programs running and no download manager used (I couldnt get a DL manager to work with downloading vista). I used a simple wget command in linux which i doubt uses multithread to download quicker.

I was hoping it'd just be some simple option I had to tick under Internet Options =/
 
Possibly on your first attempt your ISP's transparent cache started cacheing the file, and on your second attempt the file came out of cache. If not - I'd love to understand what might be happening.
 
Doubt its cache, because I stopped downloading the file on the windows machine soon after I started it. On the linux box it maintained 350KB+ thorought the download. It makes me wonder how many other slow downloads would have downloaded fast on the linuxbox...
 
Last edited:
I am a Windows User, But throw some Spyware at it and it falls over.

Linux rules
 
Yea, the windows machines I was using had no spyware. Especially the server since IE has hardly been opened before. Use an array of anti-spyware too. Guess i'm not gona figure this one out. Oh well, guess I'l just use linux for big downloads!
 
Couple of possibilities off the top of my head: Could be TCP/IP window size too small, or possibly MTU fragmentation affecting speed. 50KB/s seems very low though even for those issues.
 
@dabouncer: Microsoft doesnt like flipin download managers. I was trying to use getright, microsoft rejects it.

Turtle: I thought about that, but doubt it because its not all downloads that are that slow. A speed test shows the correct speeds.
 
For Vista beta downloads, Microsoft offers the use of a download manager.
 
That download manager didnt work. Probably because of the nature of my network and hardware firewall.
 
Did anyone resolve this?

I have almost the same issuem with a similair setup. My 4Mbit line only works fully off my linux machine, my Vista box is limited to 50KB/s. It's not network congestion, otherwise the linux machine would suffer as well.

LAN transfers are limited as well.
 
I on the other hand have no problems with my 4mbps line. I download max at 430kb/s, local or international., win98, 2000, xp, 2003, vista, xbox360, and linux. OK, when it comes to international, i must add that the site and the transparent proxy must be able to push that amount of data. I was doing windows updates on vista the other day, to find out that all the traffic came from 165.x.x.x adres, which is one of the Telkom transparent proxies (you dont see them)

Your server 2003 doesnt have some sort of network load balancing on the network cards or something dodgy?

Did your modem sync with the DSLAM at 4096? Do another test from ftp.is.co.za, download a file or something with windows and see where it goes. Download the same file from linux box, and see where it goes.

There shouldn't be any diffrences, its just physically impossible :P
Ciao
 
Or it could be that your windows machine is using 8-bit ISA slot network card in a ring topology, where your linux is a fiber interconnected 1000mbps to the switch... it doesnt make sense at all!
 
Er, you guys are surely over complicating it. It's simply that you need to use a download manager to get multi-threaded downloads. The normal IE download "thing" will only connect using a single thread.

You might not always be able to use a download manager for MS downloads, but IDM (internet download manager) should handle most downloads and take full advantage of your line.

I assume that the Linux default browser has a built in download manager to connect to multiple threads.
 
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