impossible - but it happened

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erebon

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I din't know where to post so I'm filling up the Off-Topic with:

The Facts:
  1. I have a dial up connection with 50Kbit/s max speed
  2. My average downloadspeed is 2-4 KByte/s (16-32Kbit/s)
  3. When I start a download the speed is 5-10 KByte/s for a few seconds, then starts decreasing
  4. I use Firefox
  5. I wanted to download Sandra(8MBytes) from here: http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.html?/sandradl_e.htm
The Odd Thing:
No sooner than I had pressed Save to Disk in the download dialog, the progressbar had filled up a lot and more than 870 KBYTES of the file had been saved on my disk. :eek:
And it continued with 50 KBytes/s and in no time more than 4 Mbytes had been downloaded. Then the speed began slowing down till it reached 5 Kbyte/s which is still impressive for longer downloads. Now it's throttling around 4 Kbyte/s and downloading further. What do you think????
 
that happened to me on dialup a long time ago!

but try downloading from a different place, u will notice that normality will be achieved!
just a one off my friend.

try downloading the same file again and what do u notice? :)
 
I've had that before too, and it confused me too ;)

It is just a confusion with the calculation of the download speed must likely, as if you leave it for a while the speed gets slower and slower - but the average speed is about right overall. Thats why modem downloads often start much higher but level out quite quickly :)
 
Hmmmm.
Anyhoo. The file is working and I can be happy.

I've had that before too, and it confused me too ;)

It is just a confusion with the calculation of the download speed must likely, as if you leave it for a while the speed gets slower and slower - but the average speed is about right overall. Thats why modem downloads often start much higher but level out quite quickly :)
Click to expand...
I don't think it's a miscalculation, as the file IS actually downloaded that fast. It just suggests the possiblities that lie in dial up. Perhaps my dial up had a dream about being a DSL connection and ...;)

It had happened before but never this BIG. At most 50 KBytes/s:p
 
Sorry to break ya little spell but..

The file started downloading the moment you clicked the link. When you finally decided where to locate it, a portion of the file was already held in your system cache/temp files.

FireFox will then recalculate (as Ian said) to even out this sudden influx. Sorry chap ;)

Combine that with burst speed and you have your reason..

Dialup is purely analogue, it can't be any faster than 56K (which is barely is with line noise), it's not a technological possibility, that's why we have DSL ...
 
Shorty said:
Sorry to break ya little spell but..

The file started downloading the moment you clicked the link. When you finally decided where to locate it, a portion of the file was already held in your system cache/temp files.

FireFox will then recalculate (as Ian said) to even out this sudden influx. Sorry chap ;)

Combine that with burst speed and you have your reason..

Dialup is purely analogue, it can't be any faster than 56K (which is barely is with line noise), it's not a technological possibility, that's why we have DSL ...
Click to expand...
I don't think so, because
  1. I was monitoring my connection with the Windows Task Manager and I know that I didn't have more activity than usual, i.e. 3-4 KB/s, until I pressed "Save"
  2. Almost no time, say 5-10 seconds, passed between me clicking the file link and pressing save so even if the file started download before me saving it it would be like 870KB/10sec = 87KB/s which is still more than, as you already completely correctly said, dialup can deliver.
So, either Taskmanager didn't show SO many packets, which as I'm sure could be very likely. Windows isn't exactly accurate most of the time... Or there is another reason which has to be marvelled at;)
 
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