On Jul 24, 2007, at 7:41 PM, Tannis Baker wrote:
Okay, so I turned off file/printer sharing and quit DropCopy. I
stopped
scheduled mail pickup on CE. I quit Skype on my desktop.
Speedtests were much more consistent - varying by only about 400 kbps.
You also had Skype running? Yeah, no wonder you couldn't get
consistent results.
A variation of 400 kb is still fairly large, but at least not totally
out of whack (but for a 3 Mbs connection, a 400 Kb change is still
too big of a swing between tests to make me comfortable, I'd still
look for other sources of bandwidth problems).
Well! What a difference a tester makes! Laptop is now slightly
faster
than the desktop according to Speakeasy (3800 kbps –> 4250 kbps) even
after several comparison trials.
Ah, yes, that is why I recommend trying a few different speed tests
when trying to isolate a problem. You never know if the one you are
testing against is having problems of its own that day (or just sucks
in general).
So, I guess it really is the speed of the machine - coupled perhaps
with
the webpages themselves and various other variables like website
server
usage and ISP usage?
Welcome to the nightmare-ish hell we network admins have to live
with. Users want things to be faster, and it becomes our job to
figure out where exactly the bottleneck is in the connection, and
changing one variable may move the clog to a different location.
But yes, doing a web page load test tells you as much about the speed
of the machine as it does about the available bandwidth as well as
some info on the server pushing the page (and that can get into a
whole different fun game... my old Quadra 610 running NetBSD could
serve a static web page faster than my G3 iMac running OS X Server...
but if I put a perl script on the page, the OS X Server machine was
lightning fast compared to the NetBSD machine).
Anyway, it looks like there is no way to speed up my laptop - which
was
my goal this time round.
If you are now getting reasonably consistent speed tests between the
G5 and the laptop, then I'd say you probably got rid of the network
bandwidth issue. So now you can look at other things, such as do you
have enough RAM in the laptop, and what other stuff do you have
running on the laptop.
Alas, I can tell you that Safari at least is just not super fast on a
G3 of any kind. I don't know what browser you are using, but there
are lots of OS X compatible ones, so you may want to try a different
one.
You can also look to see if there is an upgrade card available for
your laptop. Although with recent used pricing, it may be cheaper (or
at least more cost sensible) to buy an entire new (used) laptop
compared to picking up an accelerator for your current one.
-chris
<www.mythtech.net>
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