33.6Kbps modem connected at 31.2Kbps and downloading at 138Kbps ... =)

[WoundedWallet]

First of all, NO I'm not crazy.

I'm in between DSL providers, so I'm connecting via my old USR 33.6 for a couple weeks, or so I hope.

Anyway, when I connect it says "connected at 31.2Kbps". Which is fine and dandy.

But I also got used to check my speed with AnalogX's NetStat Live. So I have it on most of the time.

When I download stuff from a website, AnalogX reports speeds in the 30s. Which is also fine and dandy.

But when I download from a newsgroup, like the headers I'm doing right now, my speed ranges from 80-110Kbps, with a max speed of 138.5Kbps.

This is dual ISDN speed on a dinky modem!!!

Now I want to know how that happens?

Is it because newsgroups have a different protocol and that allows my modem to just suck stuff in?

Anybody knows why this is happening? I'm curious.

 

[IamDavid]

First of all, NO I'm not crazy.

Just been hittin the bottle alittle to much lately...

 

[WoundedWallet]

As matter of fact.... nah! never mind

Now I'm down in the 30s again, but all of a sudden it jumped up to 140s for like a minute or so and I had a top spike of 170.7Kbps!!!

This is cool, but I wish I knew why this is happening so I could duplicate it in the future.

If it makes any difference, it's an ISA modem, and yes I have tweaked my registry(for DSL) and yes the modem is set up to 115200.

 

[WoundedWallet]

hehe

I think I know what's going on...

I just checked on AnalogX's website and the new version of NetStat Live corrected a "rate spike in W2k"

I've downloaded the newest version and I'll leave it on all night and see what it reports tomorrow morning. If there is no abnormal speeds I'll delete the title of this thread and put a instead...

But it wasn't me that was crazy!!!

 

[SlimHarpo]

<< But when I download from a newsgroup, like the headers I'm doing right now, my speed ranges from 80-110Kbps, with a max speed of 138.5Kbps. >>



Usenet servers give you uncompressed text, so your modem's compression is able to pack it down a lot. Your download monitor must be looking at the uncompressed text, instead of the amount of actual, compressed, data coming in.

 

[WoundedWallet]

<< so your modem's compression is able to pack it down a lot >>

There's gotta be something related to downloading headers specifically, cause when I'm downloading bodies the speed stays under 50K.

I just tested it again with the newer version and I'm still getting speeds up to 156.7 while downloading headers. While the bodies are under 35K mostly.

Maybe the headers have a different packing, I don't know. But if all that I get that fast are the headers, then this is not something to get to excited about.

But it is odd...

 

[FUBAR]

Could be because the header information is rather uniform, like a lot of repeated author/subject/date header labels or something...

just a thought.