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Ubuntu Download Speeds Beat Windows XP's
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?"
Anecdotally, I have also noticed that Ubuntu boxes tend to hog bandwidth, as compared to an XP box at home. When someone on the home LAN starts downloading or streaming something from a linux box, everyone else notices it immediately. The XP box is (inadvertently?) more polite about it. Still, if you're the only one pulling in the big byte loads, faster is definitely better.
possibly due to tcp window scaling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_window_scale_option
ubuntu does it. Windows XP does not.
The TCP window scale option is an option to increase the TCP receive window size above its maximum value of 65,536 bytes. This TCP option, along with several others, is defined in IETF RFC 1323 which deals with Long-Fat networks, or LFN.
-rant mode, how I found out about it.
The secure side of the Presidents Choice banking web site is royally hosed by a machine that tries to use tcp window scaling. Why can't a web service provider, one that should be extra careful about security understand a standard concept.
Yeah people keep claiming this with no real data to prove it up so it's about as worthless as the shit that the article claims. My parents have an XP box with only 512 megs of RAM and it easily maxes out at the 22mbps that they have. And that's with a half dozen apps open and at least 8 things running in the background on the systray. Seriously, the extra 256 megs of RAM isn't going to give you magically 2x the bandwidth.
Product A in lab tests always performs over 100% better/faster than product B.
Product B in normal use always performs over 100% better/faster than product A.
Which are you going to want to use? Perhaps product A is designed to max the test, while product B is designed to handle varying conditions.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Dell XPS M1530 Intel Core 2 Duo (2.16ghz) 3 gigs RAM Dual Booting Windows Vista Home Premium AND Ubuntu 8.10 http://www.bandwidth.com/tools/speedTest/ Six tests per OS. Vista: Download/Upload 7616/2795 7865/2724 6407/2755 10050/2800 12320/3925 15854/2905 Ubuntu: Download/Upload 12939/5897 8849/12122 15373/18646 20040/17093 8461/14969 17885/13807
Well, even if the hardware was the same, I'd blame the drivers. On Windows, lots of networking equipment has crummy drivers coded by companies that really don't care that work, but with much higher latency and bandwidth than the hardware is capable of.
I actually get better performance off the USB wifi card in my desktop than the PCI one built-in, because the PCI one has lousy drivers and the USB one has good drivers.
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