Speeding up File Transfers

[Kurt Granroth]

Steve Holmes wrote:
> I just got signed up to Sprint Broadband internet service here under the
> impression I could get high download speeds near 100KBPS.  Unfortunately,
> I am only getting transfers in the mid twenty's on a good day.  A test at
> their demo FTP site yielded much higher results but I noticed their test
> file was a nulls.  I'll bet the fact the file is all the same character
> might result in "on the fly" data compression.
> 
> I haven't yet tried this on a winblows machine yet but all my friends
> using the service with their winblows are getting speeds much better than
> me.  I'm wondering if linux needs to be tweaked around a bit to speed up
> file transfers?  I tried adding a window value on the route command for my
> network setup but that seems to have no visible results.  

I've noticed that the download speeds for SBB are *really* variable.
On average, I seem to get 20-40KBs... but at peak times, it's as low
as 10.  Every now and then, I get great downloads... the highest I've
seen is 160KBs.  Just a few minutes ago, I was dl'ing at 140KBs.

Somebody else mentioned that SBB was reworking Gilbert.. and I can
second that.  In the past few weeks(months), things have gotten much
faster.

However, in the past few months, I get a lot more drop-outs, too.  My
connection drops for anywhere from a few minutes to over 6 hours.  It
happens at least weekly and sometimes daily.  It can be more than a
little irritating when I'm working.

Upload speeds is bursty and horrible.  If the file is less than a
couple hundred kilo, then it's pretty fast.  But if gets over 500K,
then the upload likes to freeze for long periods of time.

FWIW, I get the exact same tx speeds on Windows and Linux.
-- 
Kurt Granroth            | http://www.granroth.org
KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer
granroth@kde.org         | granroth@suse.com
            KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop