A little network and/or downloading question

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Alan Bolte
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A little network and/or downloading question

Post by Alan Bolte »

I'm looking at a graph of my download speed, and at the moment I'm seeing a fairly constant speed of 250 kB/s, except for every 60 seconds or so, when the speed plunges and then pics up again over maybe 10 seconds. Would someone mind explaining to me why that is?
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Netko
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Post by Netko »

This is with standard downloading or p2p?
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phongn
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Re: A little network and/or downloading question

Post by phongn »

Alan Bolte wrote:I'm looking at a graph of my download speed, and at the moment I'm seeing a fairly constant speed of 250 kB/s, except for every 60 seconds or so, when the speed plunges and then pics up again over maybe 10 seconds. Would someone mind explaining to me why that is?
Note: this may be the problem, but it could be something else:

One thing that happens in TCP/IP is your receive window - which says how many packets can be in-flight at once, essentially. It starts small, climbs and when it gets too high the window gets cut in half - and starts growing again. Unfortunately, the current algorithms for window-size consideration are not particularly good for high-speed networks and can cause problems like this.
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