Author Topic: Low network utilization?  (Read 6491 times)

Offline idolminds

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Low network utilization?
« on: Sunday, March 13, 2011, 12:09:27 PM »
A weird problem has come up on my dads laptop, which he uses to connect to the internet. He has his own ISP account, but hes got a cheaper package that has a limit of 20hrs/mo, where I have the unlimited one. So he complains when sites take a long time to load. I've got adblock on there for him to at least cut that stuff out.

Well today my brother was using it and saying sites were taking forever for him, and a lot of them timing out. So I went to have a look, decided to put an image blocking addon I like on there for them (ImgLikeOpera, can set images to not load automatically, and then you can right click the ones you want and they will load. Saves a ton of time). For an 85k download it took WAY to long to install. Something was definitely up.

I checked the networking tab of task manager and it looked like network utilization was hovering around 43%. Just to check I want over to my PC where I was downloading something from itunes and it said utilization was at 95% or something like that. I didnt see other programs running or using the network, I tried using Opera instead of Firefox and it had the same slowness so its not the browser. I even disabled the software firewall and it was still slow.

Anyone know what might be going on? I've never seen it before.

Offline scottws

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Re: Low network utilization?
« Reply #1 on: Sunday, March 13, 2011, 01:26:15 PM »
Utilization is a percentage of Windows' perceived speed of the connection.  So lets say Windows sees a regular 100 Mbps connection.  If you are getting 50 Mbps throughput, you get 50% utilization.  But if you are getting 50% packet loss the utilization will be very low even if the "speed" of the connection should support a faster transfer rate and utilization.

It could be anything.  Ancient computer that can't keep up with the traffic, crappy NIC or modem, misconfigured network stack and port speed settings, bad connections, interference, or a bad line.

Offline idolminds

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Re: Low network utilization?
« Reply #2 on: Sunday, March 13, 2011, 07:51:02 PM »
Well....crud. Thanks for the info.