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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?"
If you can prove to people that you can download pr0n faster using Linux, they WILL switch!
I'm kidding! I'm kidding!
(or, am I?)
His window machine's contribution to a bot net is probably hogging some bandwidth.
surely that is quicker than writing a /. article.
Nullius in verba
I'd guess it's some kind of TCP/IP optimization (the default size of packets, etc). It's set to one thing on Ubuntu, and another on Windows (probably for some historical reason or due to some old buggy driver).
If that's not it, I'd bet pretty high it's a bad driver in Windows.
It's quite likely that either Windows or Ubuntu is intrinsically faster for some reason, but I doubt the difference based on the way the networking stack is designed is anywhere near 10%, let alone 50% for a link this fast. On 10 gigE maybe, but not on a simple cable modem.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
True, but considering both computers should easily be able to saturate a 100baseT connection, shouldn't both configurations be able to saturate a 22Mbps link?
This is different than the guy complaining that the computers can't fill a gigabit ethernet connection with a scp transfer while music is playing.
The http that the speed test should be using doesn't have any encryption, shouldn't be using gzip, and it shouldn't be saved to hard drive.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
It's the TCP implementations, and probably the TCP window size limits. Windows could turn in the same numbers if properly tuned.
You want to read this article for all the in-depth details: http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/tcptune/
Windows has a default set many years ago, and never updated. Most of the Free Unix variants update every release, and some new variants even have fancy auto-scaling code. Any time you want to get over 10Mbps/second across any real latency with a SINGLE TCP stream you probably need to do some tuning, for some OS's the limit is much lower.
ISP's run into this all the time. An uninformed admin buys a GigE in LA and NY, pops up an FTP server and wonders why he can only get a few megabits a second across the "crappy network". A few settings later and behold, the same hardware can saturate a full gigabit.
Note, don't just go set your values really high, there are performance (memory used) tradeoffs....
Actually I can see it all the time. My Ubuntu laptop's (IBM T42) WiFi is about 50% faster that the same configured Windows machine of my wife. We're talking about SAME hardware. I don't really know if it's drivers, or something else.
Performance on LAN is more similar, difference is about 10-20% max, but with this kind of hardware it heavily depends on HDD to write data and Windows is crap at this - it's swapping - god knows why!!!
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
Not to mention the ultra reliable online speed tests.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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.
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.
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.
That's a myth.
Clarification about the use of QoS in end computers that are running Windows XP
As in Windows 2000, programs can take advantage of QoS through the QoS APIs in Windows XP. One hundred percent of the network bandwidth is available to be shared by all programs unless a program specifically requests priority bandwidth. This "reserved" bandwidth is still available to other programs unless the requesting program is sending data. By default, programs can reserve up to an aggregate bandwidth of 20 percent of the underlying link speed on each interface on an end computer. If the program that reserved the bandwidth is not sending sufficient data to use it, the unused part of the reserved bandwidth is available for other data flows on the same host.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316666
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
A new low in slashdot history. Can't remember a worse headline and article in recent times, can anyone else?
This article is just one big WTF. Is slashdot that desperate for traffic?
By these standards your nut article will indeed make a headline soon.
And why did my submission not get posted, yet:
My windows PC with a 27 inch screen runs at 1600x1200 resolution, my ubuntu on a 15 incher only 1024x768. Are windows graphics drivers better than the linux kernel?"
I'm a sysadmin at Ohio State, and a number of old firewalls (really old OpenBSD version plus badly-written pf scripts, still in use!) have the same problem. The connection through them breaks when any computer using TCP window scaling over "2" (Windows Vista, Linux) tries to connect to a server behind the firewall. So, yes, window scaling will either make the connection blazing fast, or will block certain users if a bad router/firewall is on the route between the computer and a server.
There are many good reasons to criticise Virgin, but they don't fuck around
Well, to be perfectly honest, that's always been my number one criticism of Virgin.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!