My downloading #'s don't add up?

[JEDI]

i surf around for a short while at 56k dialup. then i decide to download stuff from Newsgroups using ForteAgent into an empty directory. At the 2hr mark, that directory has 20megs of files in it but my dialup connection status says 30 megs have been received. Thought it was kinda weird that i surfed 10 megs worth of data.

Now i go and watch tv. at the 5 hr mark, there's 70megs of files in the directory, but the status says 100megs has been received. WTF? The gap grew from 10 megs to 30 and i didn;t even do anything?

What's going on???

 

[perry]

TCP/IP overhead, headers for the messages, if they're binaries, then the text encoding will take up more space than the actual file.. etc. There's lots of reasons for the numbers to vary.

 

[JEDI]

hm..after some more investigating, i noticed that in my Agent directory, some .DAT files were 50+ megs in size. What r these dat files? do they clean itself up after i finish downloading?