On Thursday 04 January 2007 12:48, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote: > On 04-Jan-07, at 12:38 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote: > >> use iftop. It's pretty good. > > > > yes - and wildly different speed from what that mtnl meter shows > > iftop shows 37 kbps and mtnl meter shows 285.91 - aha, found the > culprit. When iftop is run to show kilobits per second instead of > kilobytes per second, then the numbers are the same as MTNL. So is > broadband kiloBITS or kiloBYTES?
suspect that MTNL speed site shows the instataneous speed for a set of small packet. Hence it will always show near maximum bandwidth. This is almost always in Kbps - K=kilo b=bits. Also the speed shown is from the MTNL server to your machine - two or three hops, and will be quite ok. The congestion is upstream on the international wire. However wget displays KBps - K=kilo B=bytes - which is the average of very many packets. And it's the throughput from the download server and all the intermediate routers which will be many many hops. The method of trying to use small packets (like ping) to check bandwidth or latency is poor practice. -- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
