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How long does it take to download 1 gig?
tbickerton
Member Posts: 5 Arc User
I know I have less than stellar internet, I was wondering how long it takes most people to download a gig and a half a gig of data for patches to NW?
I'll offer up that a half gig is about 1.5 - 2 hours assuming I sit and don't use the internet for anything else.
A gig roughly 3 hours, perhaps a bit longer.
So my question is how long is typical and what type connection are you using.
I have cable modem and the above download seems typical.
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The other thing is thanks to NW for the detect less than state of the art computers and offer up a single button adjustment for performance.
Would it be possible to add in a button that switches between typical performance that may have slow frame rate, latency and lag but be live with able , and top performance button that drops everything to as low as possible to enhance movement / playing during pvp or boss fights etc.
*****
These are my two greatest aggravations atm, and I was kind of hoping others either know of solutions or at least can commiserate with me.
*******
I admit that I am new to NW and while at times it feels like a late beta test version I am enjoying the content for the first time.
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Other issues bags , and mail sorting, and deleting , conformation options
Really need bag space, and I have not found a way other than $ to get bank space.
Thanks for listening.
Liza
I'll offer up that a half gig is about 1.5 - 2 hours assuming I sit and don't use the internet for anything else.
A gig roughly 3 hours, perhaps a bit longer.
So my question is how long is typical and what type connection are you using.
I have cable modem and the above download seems typical.
************
The other thing is thanks to NW for the detect less than state of the art computers and offer up a single button adjustment for performance.
Would it be possible to add in a button that switches between typical performance that may have slow frame rate, latency and lag but be live with able , and top performance button that drops everything to as low as possible to enhance movement / playing during pvp or boss fights etc.
*****
These are my two greatest aggravations atm, and I was kind of hoping others either know of solutions or at least can commiserate with me.
*******
I admit that I am new to NW and while at times it feels like a late beta test version I am enjoying the content for the first time.
***
Other issues bags , and mail sorting, and deleting , conformation options
Really need bag space, and I have not found a way other than $ to get bank space.
Thanks for listening.
Liza
Post edited by tbickerton on
0
Comments
It depends on a lot of things, mostly your internet connection but your local machine's disk speeds (full, or badly fragmented or something disk) or if running something else that ties up the system, longer.
As for how long it should take, remember that isp speeds give you a max burst speed, not average speed. Average speed varies too much to say. Better connections (more expensive) have a minimum speed guarantee sometimes.
Regardless, here is the basics to figure it out...
your connection has a speed, usually given in bits per second (baud) instead of bytes per second to make it sound bigger. 8 bits is a byte. A byte is still the smallest working unit in the hardware of a typical computer (I can explain but it boils down to hardware design). Now, on top of your DATA, since you are talking tcpip you have extra information going down the wire -- headers for the packets that wrap the data. So some small % of the bandwidth is consumed with junk that is not your data.
Also there is the powers of 2 problem. Files are in powers of 2 .... a megabyte for example is 2^20, not exactly 1 million. The bigger the data (over 1 meg), the larger the error becomes. At 1 gb, it is significant -- its a fair bit (haha, bit) more than 1 billion.
So, anyway, take your file size (exact, not rounded off to MB or GB or whatever) of the actual data. Multiple by 8 to get that in bits. Multiply that by say 5% to account for non-data bandwidth consumption. Divide that by your connection speed in bits/second and you get seconds. That is how long it should take, approximately, if there is no other problem on the machine causing slowness.
If yours were say 5 MBPS, then ...
1 gb = 2^30 I think (?) so your file size is 1,073 million bytes.
that is 8.6 billion bits. 5% for traffic is right at 9 billion bits, slightly over but meh, 5 was a guess anyway.
so you have 9 billion coming in at 5 million per sec.
If I did not mess up that is 1720 seconds. That is 28 min.
you are taking 3 times as long or longer, so your cable stinks.
If everything is not going optimally (lots of server fits and starts, distance/pipeline issues, speed cap on their end rather than mine (or too much traffic demand against them, whatever), it can vary wildly. Like, most of those free-download file sharer sites are pretty slow, while Steam is usually pretty fast.
USA Comcast Business class used. So download is pretty fair but my upload speed sucks. :rolleyes:
Edit: time of day can matter a lot too, if you live in a busy city area, because of the demand aspect. Netflix during primetime watching hours can be horrid where I live, so I tend to only use it after midnight or during common day-work hours. :P
...I kinda miss the days where websites weren't all about imagery and flashy graphic effects/features, speed or no speed.
Hehe, you mean when websites were educational and written by hand in notepad or vi, etc?
9600 .. you speed demon you. If it was US Robotics you had some real horsepower there.
And yup...US Robotics. I remember that. hehe.
Yup, I remember the days of using that slow (_l_) modem. Dialing into the bbs system.. A few megs for the hard drive and only dos.. Most systems were cga (4 colors I think) then ega (16 colors) then vga (256 colors) then super vga (loads of colors $800-$1000 for a tiny one when they first came out). Shut, Even in the late 90's, like '99 a 16 megabyte video card by voodoo was the HAMSTER!! ROFL. Ohh, how the times have changed and ever so rapidly..
Ghosts and Goblins if I remember correctly was a huge game back then. Even w/ a "stellar" system, it would take forever to do the initial load where you could eventually play. Police Quest, Kings Quest, Space Quest.. The days of Sierra being a huge player in the video game world.. Oh, the memories..
Before that I did not have one, used them at school and friend's house but my parents made me buy my own and it took a while to earn 2500 bucks as a kid back then...
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