Download bandwidth difference in Operating Systems?

Question

Hello I've recently discovered an interesting thing.

I've made my own Speedmeter using Flash CS4 and ActionScript 3.0. The Download side is based on downloading 2 Mp3 noise files. Using the built-in method getBytesLoaded() and a simple math it's easy to calculate actual connection speed. Actual speed is evaluated every second.

It works pretty good and the actual and average speed is very accurate under Windows. But when I've tried this under Ubuntu the actual speed results are different--and by different I mean that my connection from ISP is 5 Mbit/s and it sometimes shows like 7 or 8 Mbit/s. But the average speed seems to be good.

What causes this strange behaviour? Does Ubuntu have some kind of download cacheing thing?

Answer 1

Two things worth checking out:

Your browser may or may not compress the traffic. It might be that the bottleneck is rendering the animation, not the actual internet speed.

Answer 2

The linux version of Adobe flash is quite terrible. I wouldn't rely on flash to accurately represent the speed or reliability of your internet connection for that reason. The best way to calculate latency and/or bandwidth is through command-line tools that present almost no overhead, such as ping for latency, and wget or rsync for bandwidth.