Can't get above 30 megabits/s

[genie187]

Hi. I was tweaking my Windows 98 to match my XP. I use TCP Optimizer for the network settings. I have a 60 Megabit connection. I was doing some speed tests on both and XP will regularly go to 60 megabits/s or higher on speed tests. On my 98, I can't seem to get above 30. It averages around 16 it appears. I tried different network cards, but none seem to help. Do I need to tweak the network settings in 98 differently to get higher?

Right now, I have the receive window set to 2055680.

[genie187]

I should add that both computers have the same network card.

[genie187]

I cut my receive window in half and now seem to be getting better results.

[genie187]

Yeah, for whatever reason, seems half that receive window gives better results, but still far from the max bandwidth. I get like 40 megabit bursts at times, but then it quickly goes back down and starts over again. My guess is it must be the older non-network hardware that the 98 machine uses that is the bottleneck compared to my XP machine.

[genie187]

Looks like I spoke too soon. I just installed an XP drive on my 98 machine and I am able to utilize my full bandwidth. So, definitely not a hardware issue. Must be a Windows 98 issue?

[fink]

Are you on DSL or Cable? Ideal MTU settings are different for each. Also some routers have their own MTU settings and requirements. High RWIN settings can also give deceptive/incorrect download speed readings because they appear higher for a few moments at the beginning of the download but correct shortly afterwards.

Tweaking all of these settings is a bit of a rabbit hole that can be hard to get out of... It's best to have all the defaults backed up because it's easy to lose track of what's been changed esp with 98 and XP which are more "tweakable" than newer OS's.

Another wild card is that testing speeds is also very dependent on net conditions outside of your LAN.. sudden slowdowns between you and the testing site can be very variable and throw off measurements even minutes apart. Time of day too since more or fewer people can be online at different times.

If you can, use a speed test that's close to you to eliminate web slowdowns over distance as much as possible. One thing that I used to do was set up an email acc't with my ISP.. they had their own email servers and were just a few hops away which eliminated a lot of potential bottlenecks. Then I'd upload an email to myself with an attachment of a known size.. a few megs and then time the download/upload with different settings. I found that to be more consistent than speed test sites most of the time. requires a bit of math though and all of these things is what finally stopped me from continually driving myself crazy with monitoring d/l speeds.

Since I've started using Win 7 and later these things are pretty much taken care of by the OS so I rarely think about it any more.

[Train]

Not so much. As it stores stuff on the hdd, make darn sure the tif folders are cleaned out. And the hdd is 7200 rpm or even a $$$$$, 10,000 rpm one.

Some of the 98 rigs even had 3800 - 4200 rpm hdds, read darn slow.

[genie187]

I'm on cable. I thought it might be the older 98 hardware, but I installed a 2nd drive in it with XP, same exact drive too, 7200 RPM Seagate. The XP gets the full bandwidth it seems in various speed tests, so definitely not the hardware. I use the same tweaks in XP and 98 as far as the TCP Optimizer. One issue I think is relying on this "wget" method of testing the bandwidth. On XP, I can use speedtest.net, but it doesn't appear to work correctly on my 98. If I could get that same site to work correctly on 98, then I think I could compare better.

Or, if you guys know another good speed testing site that would work on both 98 and XP, that might help. I was able to get speedguide.net to work, but the numbers are extremely off on all PCs.

[fink]

I have found the test supported by dslreports to be accurate and reliable. It also goes into much more detail than most others.

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

[genie187]

Thanks. That looks like a good one. I see it uses HTML 5. I'm going to see if I can find a browser for 98 that will run that test to compare to my XP.

[Train]

Being wireless with this 10 year old antique it will be slower. than 60 Mbps and I do have a lot of buffer bloat in routers to the teswt sites from here.

[genie187]

Hi, Train. Is that on Windows 98? Which browser are you using? Here is how I was testing:

wget -O nul http://download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip

I get an average of 6 to 7 megabytes on XP, but only 1 to 2 megabytes on 98 no matter how many times I run it.

[Train]

Now the download is written to the harddrive, how fast is it spinning??
Post the make and model of both and I will find out.

Now I am not running Windows, AntiX-16, and I do have a SSD in this antique so:

 wget -O nul http://download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip
--2017-01-08 07:51:07--  http://download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip
Resolving download.thinkbroadband.com (download.thinkbroadband.com)... 80.249.106.10, 2a02:68:1:8::2
Connecting to download.thinkbroadband.com (download.thinkbroadband.com)|80.249.106.10|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/zip]
Saving to: ‘nul’

nul                      100%[====================================>] 100.00M  2.15MB/s   in 54s

My limiting factor is my wireless adapter. Broadcom BCM4321

[Train]

Using win10 wired with 7200 rpm hdd.

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.14393]
(c) 2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>
C:\WINDOWS\system32>wget -O nul http://download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip
SYSTEM_WGETRC = c:/progra~1/wget/etc/wgetrc
syswgetrc = C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32/etc/wgetrc
--2017-01-08 08:12:29--  http://download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip
Resolving download.thinkbroadband.com... 80.249.106.10
Connecting to download.thinkbroadband.com|80.249.106.10|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/zip]
Saving to: `nul'

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 7.91M/s   in 18s

2017-01-08 08:12:47 (5.59 MB/s) - `nul' saved [104857600/104857600]

Win 10 Firefox browser and wired I get using the dsl link fink posted.


While speedtest.net shows


Time to fire up the old Dell 755.

[Train]

Try again.
Old Dell 755, 2 GB of ram and has a SSD.

$ wget -O nul http://download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip
--2017-01-08 08:28:41--  http://download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip
Resolving download.thinkbroadband.com (download.thinkbroadband.com)... 80.249.106.10, 2a02:68:1:8::2
Connecting to download.thinkbroadband.com (download.thinkbroadband.com)|80.249.106.10|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/zip]
Saving to: ‘nul’

nul                      100%[====================================>] 100.00M  7.84MB/s   in 17s    

2017-01-08 08:28:58 (5.84 MB/s) - ‘nul’ saved [104857600/104857600]