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terryh |
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saintly |
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Saintly educated me and helped me understand the process a bit more. I'm very grateful for the quick response given to me. That counts for a lot. Thanks! |
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[08-24-2000] terryh : Hi
Thanks in advance for your help. It's much appreciated.
When we switched to a DSL internet connection a few months ago, we were promised the moon and stars in regards to how fast it would perform. Downloads have been much faster, but surfing and clicking on links is just as slow as always. I thought it was supposed to be instantaneous. By the way, we are only 1/2 mile from the station hub. Anything we can do to get those "lightening quick" responses when we are on the web?
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[08-24-2000] saintly :
Yes. You can add more memory (RAM, but a bigger hard drive might also help a litte, but not much) to your computer and upgrade your processor to a faster one. Both of these help Netscape to load and jump to pages faster, but this will still not be instantaneous or lightning-quick...
DSL only affects the maximum transfer speed to your computer. Clicking on the links is a semi-complex process. Netscape (or whatever browser) reads the location you want to go to, looks up/converts the location into a numeric one that it can use, figures out how to get there, sends the request and waits for the server to respond, then interprets the response to display it as a web page. Every picture in the page requires a separate transaction. Furthermore, the old web page has to be stored on disk so you can go back to it and a variety of other things.
These tasks are processor-intensive and memory-intensive. Only the actual transferring of pages to you is sped up by DSL. I work on a T3, which is something like 10 times faster than the fastest DSL and I still have to wait for pages.
Although you have a fast connection to the Internet provider, connecting to a web site means that you have to go through several other networks, and share their bandwidth (download/transfer capacity) with all the other people who are using them. You can think of it as being a long chain. You have a fairly strong (fast) link at your end with the DSL connection and proximity to the station. However, between you and the site you want to go to there are other links which may be weaker; slower connections, or fast connections that you have to share with lots of other people. Your ability to access the site is limited to the slowest link along the way.
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