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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?"
Because we all know that more RAM == more internet bandwidth right? Oh wait...
No, blame Bush.
This is why you disable swap on Windows, it can't handle swap space with anything resembling intelligence.
I'll put this in programming terms, as it's easiest. "Similar" has two major functional programming prototypes - one with two parameters that always returns a boolean, and one with three parameters that always outputs a float. There are OOP variants of these, where one of the parameters is given as the instance on which the operation is being applied.
similar2 would be A is similar to B. similar3 would be A is more similar to B than to C. (This is legit, as you can do a greater than operation on a real.) The OOP version of similar2 might be: Given A, object B is similar.
It makes no sense, however, in a strongly-typed language, to ask if true is greater than false. (Indeed, even in weakly-typed languages, you should never do this comparison, as it's implementation-dependent. One-sided inequalities are also less efficient, even when you can depend on them.) This is generally seen as a coding bug, though you might pass it off as a waste of CPU cycles. It can "work", say in C, but it can't be trusted to work in the same way even on the same system, and takes more compute power even if you could trust it (or modified the compiler to make sure that it could be trusted).
So, now that I've argued that good coding practices apply as much in English as they do in software, can I pull off an encore and show the comparison is on-topic? Well, yes! In this case, I can, because it's bad programming practices that make Windows XP slower on downloads than Ubuntu! The drain on CPU cycles due to poor coding standards is the primary cause of latency on any system. In this particular case, the latency affects Windows XP, but it also applies to the Linux I/O bug that was discussed earlier. If we genuinely wish to see unnecessary latency eliminated from our lives, we must seek to improve our coding standards rather than munge workarounds for the bugs. Linux' I/O isn't perfect, but the truly impressive latency figures show the superb work done on developing high-quality code rather than having layers-upon-layers of hacks and bit-rot.
It won't win any "I Am Linux" awards, but I would argue that communication would be cleaner, with fewer errors, greater bandwidth and lower latency, if people DID think of themselves in terms of Linux - or, at least, more so than in terms of Windows. (Three parameters, so a greater than is valid.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)