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Ubuntu Download Speeds Beat Windows XP's

Posted by timothy on from the aggregated-circumstances dept.

narramissic writes "Doing a download speed test of his Time Warner cable connection, James Gaskin discovered something odd, something that he is quick to note isn't a rigorous benchmarked lab test. The discovery: His Ubuntu machine 'returned a rating from the Bandwidth.com test of 22-25mbps over several tests' while the same test done from a Windows XP PC returned a rating of 12-14mbps. The two computers used in the test are 'almost identical: both off-lease Compaq small form factor D515s, part of the very popular corporate desktop D500 family. Both have Pentium 4 processors running at 2GHz. The Ubuntu machine has 768MB of RAM, while the XP box has only 512MB of RAM. Both run Firefox 3 as their browser.' Gaskin's question: Can a little extra RAM make that much difference in Internet download speeds or does Ubuntu handles networking that much faster than Windows XP?"

12 of 515 comments (clear)

  1. Even if the answer is no... by thedonger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The test was done on machines with differing configurations, so therefore is not valid. But interesting nonetheless.

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    1. Re:Even if the answer is no... by hansamurai · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not to mention the ultra reliable online speed tests.

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      Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
    2. Re:Even if the answer is no... by no-body · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Right - different OS _is_ a different configuration, with that logic all OS benchmarks are invalid.

      That Windoze's TCP/IP stack is inefficient compared to Linux has come up before, so - yawn!

    3. Re:Even if the answer is no... by gad_zuki! · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Who gets 22mbps from a cable modem? Regardless, Im guessing either the ubuntu machine wasnt configured to use the ISPs web proxy but the windows one was or that the windows machine's antivirus was crippling the download.

      This is a really lazy test. Didnt swap out hardware, didnt try different networks, didnt try clean installs, didnt tell us what network drivers he was using, didnt try anything really.

      Also, there's no unique thing as "downloading." Its just TCP/IP. Why not try a share on the local lan? That simplifies things quite a bit. Or at the very least get off your ass and try a different ISP.

      I want to say I'm surprised something so shoddy got on the slashdot, but I really am not that surprised. Between the lazy posts and idle stuff somehow getting loose into other sections, slashdot has gotten pretty crappy lately.

    4. Re:Even if the answer is no... by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because we all know that more RAM == more internet bandwidth right? Oh wait...

      If the machine's swapping it's not going to have a lot of room to cache that data until it's written to disk. XP is not spectacular at 512 megs.

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      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  2. amazing by dirtyhippie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Clearly, there is no more reliable test of network performance than a flash application running inside of a web browser. On machines that are "oh, more or less" identical (I'd really like to know what network card is in them, for example?). Sheesh.

  3. swap the ram and find out by bugs2squash · · Score: 5, Insightful

    surely that is quicker than writing a /. article.

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    Nullius in verba
    1. Re:swap the ram and find out by Sockatume · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Let's not jump on the guy. He didn't write the /. article. He wrote a single-page blog post about something interesting he spotted. Maybe he's out swapping the RAM right now. Blame the Slashdot submitter and editors.

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      No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
  4. A bogus test by dark+grep · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Great, very scientific. Swap the OS on both machines and see if the results hold. Otherwise 'almost exactly the same' doesn't cut it. Do a real test - the way it is described here is bogus. It may excite the Linux fan boi's but no one else is going to take it seriously.

  5. Uh.. by mikkelm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Only on slashdot can you have front page articles featuring original "research" done with no controls, no baselines, dissimilar base conditions, and sample bases of one single result, and have the headline speak conclusively in favour of the observed results.

    If it makes FOSS looks good, that is. This is worse than digg.

  6. Re:Linux on the desktop by Hottie+Parms · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Along the same reasoning, a good reason to switch to Linux is to avoid the malware that you get from browsing those questionable pr0n torrent sites.

    I'm not kidding.

    (Or, am I?)

  7. Re:Dated OS? by vux984 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, if its a 12mbps link, and ubuntu is getting 22mbps, there is more likely something else going on than "ubuntu > xp" here.

    A lot of cable providers provide 'speed boosts' to the first bit of bandwidth you request from a given source. It makes the internet as a whole a lot snappier, while large downloads etc take about as long as usual.

    Perhaps they speed boosted his ubuntu test for some reason.

    Another possibility, is that their bandwidth analyzer isn't working properly on ubuntu and is reporting double what it should be.

    I mean, if XP was getting significantly less than his link speed and ubuntu was getting the full link speed I'd suggest bad drivers, bad cable, bad something... but XP is delivering what it should be, while ubuntu is delivering apparently more than is possible -- so my first approach would be to ensure ubuntu is REALLY getting 22mbps here, and determine how that's even possible.

    e.g. ... When you measure the speed of light and find it to be twice c, your first assumption would be that you've done something seriously wrong in calculating the result, not that you've just figured out a technique for FTL communications.