Blown away!

Hello - I was just in Best Buy in the pc dept. When the salesmen went to check some items on their website. I was totally blown away at the ultra fast load times. It was like the pages were exploding on the screen! My pc (no supercomputer but no slouch either, 3.2 proc & 4 GB ram & cable modem) can't even come close - I have a 2 -3 second load time per page. How the heck do they do that!?! Regards, Slowpoke.

 

Talking to several people in the past, who were knowledgeable in computer technology, they emphasized the fact that internet surfing speed was dictated almost exclusively by the type of connection. The machine power certainly is a factor but not as much as a fast connection. I think JRViejo is right internal networks can be very fast in comparison.

 

I found that browsing speed mainly depends on the following:

Operating system
Software that runs in the background (anti-virus and such)

Take Windows for example. At home, FF opens in approx. 0.5 seconds or so and pages load almost instantly, even at a meager 1.5Mbps connection, and this with P2P running in the background and happily churning. At work, a laptop loaded with McAfee crap and additional quality software causes FF to launch in approx. 10 seconds, tabs take 1-2 seconds to open, pages load slowly, even though I'm on a 20Mbps connection.

In both cases, Windows XP SP3 with 2GB RAM ...

Running anti-virus software, especially those that check web pages code and those that consult their databases if the sites are green/red or whatnot, cause a huge slowdown in browsing. HUGE. People do not realize this.

Now use any Linux and you'll see an even greater increase in responsiveness and browsing experience.

Personal firewalls are also a menace. I only know of three personal firewalls that do not slow down the browsing, even when heavily loaded with connections. These are windows firewall, sygate and kerio 2.1.5. There might be others, but I did not test them all.

All others (that I tested) cause a human-noticeable slowdown in response.

Another thing the "quality" security products do is increase resource usage. FF at home runs at 50MB or so when opened, even with some 15 extensions. At work, with only 4 extensions (all included at home too), 150MB.

Home OS footprint - 250MB. Work OS footprint - 1200MB. All because of the anti-virus and related stuff. If these are turned off, resource usage goes down by two thirds!!

CPU usage is also affected. Home, 1-2% at most, 8% when really downloading like hell (500 connections or so). At work, steady 5-9% with spikes to 20-30% every few seconds.

Build your OS smartly, and you'll be able to achieve hundreds of percent improvements in performance, response time. Hundreds!

This is why I never understood why people complain about some programs being slow or why their browser takes a long time to launch. The simple answer is - check your systray, you're likely to find there software that is detrimental to the performance of your machine.

This also affects your ability to run your machine for a long time. I rebooted my home Windows approx. once every month or so. Again, because my baseline is unaffected by programs that trash the system all over the place.

Last bluescreen: 4 years ago, excluding GPU overheating last year - once.

All of these come from carefully planning a smart, modest, conservative system with very few badly-coded, ravenous programs that torture your resources.

Think about it.

Cheers,
Mrk

 

the pages are cached and are loaded from disk probably.

 

my web browsing is basically like that. i have a 50/20 connection and its just so fast pages load in the blink of a eye i have verizon fios

 

I still use IE 7, and on this 5 years old computer this browser is extremely fast. Basically, 0 seconds to open a webpage.

It can be slower, as I've noticed with some AVs.

But KIS 2010 and the Avira suite allow for fast browsing, most of the time.
Even McAfee Virusscan Plus (without the SiteAdvisor) was reasonably fast.

 

Biggest factors determining internet speed are your connection speed and number of hops it takes for your packet to reach it destination. For example, have a look at this site http://visualroute.visualware.com/ (JAVA required) and enter an address of a popular site like www.yahoo.com. Run it and hit the "table" tab a see the number of hops it takes to reach yahoo from that host company's server. If you download the trial version of this software and run a trace route from your IP, you will get the true number of hops from your PC to any particular site.

Now, for Bestbuy the number of hops will be far fewer, like just 1 or 2 to reach their internal central server from one of their retail outlets. Thus, the page loading time is very fast.

or as someone has suggested already, the retail outlet could have the internal website cached, in which case, the limiting factor is just the connection speed. If they are using the widely available 10/100 Ethernet then they page will open at 100 Mbps. If they are on 10/100/1000 Ethernet then the page will open at 1 Gbps.

 

Below link suggests:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070209/124307.shtml

 

Yep. Clear the cache (which most businesses rarely do), and you'll see it return to normal speeds.

Or as Bob said, and showed with the link, intranet site.

 

Most large chain stores have POS and catalog systems that aren't pulling from the internet, just across the LAN (100 meg or gigabit) from servers that are onsite and keep locally cached copies of the data from a large WAN.

 

At home, I am on a 3 Mbps ADSL line, and with opera, fast websites like Google News load up near instantaneously...no noticeable delay...just click and it loads.

I find that my university's intranet pages actually load a bit slower. ..maybe a sec or more than at home. The desktop systems at the Univ labs have only IE running, and more importantly, they have nasty McAffee installed ( volume licensing agreement I believe).

 

Yup, the Internet deccelerator.
Mrk

 

What did you do to pass the time while you were waiting?