🚀 go-pugleaf

seanc wrote:
> It's not dedicated bandwidth, it is a shared broadcast medium, and when the
> you approach the supposed ~37% max utilization you will begin to feel a severe
> performance hit, I have witnessed this time and again on corporate net's so am
> a believer. 

Very often, if your LAN has problems at that low a utilization, there
are network problems or design flaws which may be the cause (not the
result) of those problems.  Not always is this the case, but I've seen
it often enough not to rule these kinds of things out.

> My average speed to my gateway is nearly 500K consistently when doing adhoc
> testing. once it passes my gateway, bounces off two or three nodes and hits
> the Net at large, my throughput is more like 1.5KBps to 50KBps.

Using a P133/32MBram/Win95/3c905/WS_FTP on a Motorola CyberSURFR cable
modem system to a server at the cable company, I've gotten up to 720
KBps.  I don't know what this is in bps if you include overhead.  This
was after I applied a patch to Win95 that I believe updated the window
size.  Before this, I was only getting 220KBps.  I also changed the
3C905 card setting to maximum throughput, which also uses your CPU more.

Now, most sites on the net I get 20-50 KBps.  However, some mirrors such
as Netscape or Microsoft give me over 500 KBps.  Not bad.

(yes, all those numbers are BYTES per second, not bits)

> As someone else noted though, testing a live network is utterly pointless.

I would not say that. Certainly its usefull to compare it to itself
during various points in time.  When I first got my cable modem last
Feb, I ran traceroutes, pings, and ftps to many sites, during the day
and night, and recorded them all.   Many people commented that
performance would be terrible soon as anyone else got on the cable modem
network with me.  So this Feb I plan to run the same tests over again,
night and day, and post both sets of results so people can see for
themselves.

Certainly, there are some days when the Internet dies for one reason or
another.  When I suspect there is something wrong, I start
pinging/tracerouting to various sites, and comparing the results to the
previous results when things are running good, you can see where the
problems are originating.  If you are an ISP buying bandwidth from
someone else, you do monitoring on a regular basis so that you can
identify if your bandwidth provider has chronic bandwidth or routing
problems that keep re-occuring.