Download speed problem

[SteelHeart]

What I noticed yesterday: when playing some game or watching movie on my PC, the download speed harshly decreases. I tried different media player, downloading by torrents and download manager, last night I reinstalled Windows (xpsp2+last updates), but the problem remains. Ideas?

[ridebmx anthony]

i had the same problem used to download at 700kb/s steady dropped to a lowsy 100kb/s so i upgrade to vista finally i download at an amazing 800kb/s steady now so id just say upgrade

[Andromeda43]

What I noticed yesterday: when playing some game or watching movie on my PC, the download speed harshly decreases. I tried different media player, downloading by torrents and download manager, last night I reinstalled Windows (xpsp2+last updates), but the problem remains. Ideas?

SteelHeart,

I know it's not always obvious, but you only have one CPU, ram and HD to handle all your programs.

The CPU, for instance, can only do one thing at a time. (single core CPU's anyway). All running programs have to share bits of time on the CPU, the more things you ask it to do, the less time each program gets on the CPU.

The more things you add to the CPU's work load, the slower the system will appear to run.

That's why thousands of man hours are spent on these forums every year, telling people how to UN-Load their PC's to gain performance. And here we are again, doing the very same thing.

You can't just keep adding and adding to the CPU's workload and not see any degradation in performance.

I wouldn't dream of trying to watch a movie and download something at the same time. Everything has to go through that one CPU and ram. Not to mention that many of those operations have to rely heavily on your pagefile on a very slow HD. (HD speed compared to CPU and ram speed)

Minimize the workload on your CPU when downloading and I'm confident you'll see your download speed increase.

Good Luck,

B)

[SteelHeart]

1GB ram, 2GHz cpu, 230GB hdd

from 1MB/s to ~380kB/s when playing a movie/game

sounds like problem to me

[Tripredacus]

1GB ram, 2GHz cpu, 230GB hdd

from 1MB/s to ~380kB/s when playing a movie/game

sounds like problem to me

It sounds normal to me.

[RJARRRPCGP]

1GB ram, 2GHz cpu, 230GB hdd

from 1MB/s to ~380kB/s when playing a movie/game

sounds like problem to me

It sounds normal to me.

I dunno, because unlike most modems with dial-up, ethernet shouldn't rely on processor core speed.

I never have been told that it does. Otherwise, shouldn't it be called a software card then?

Edited October 18, 2007 by RJARRRPCGP

[Tripredacus]

1GB ram, 2GHz cpu, 230GB hdd

from 1MB/s to ~380kB/s when playing a movie/game

sounds like problem to me

It sounds normal to me.

I dunno, because unlike most modems with dial-up, ethernet shouldn't rely on processor core speed.

I never have been told that it does. Otherwise, shouldn't it be called a software card then?

First of all, torrents take up a lot of processor. There is usually a limit your client will get to (not an actual limit) where you will notice it is impossible to use the computer for anything else. I believe that it is dictated mostly by the amount of RAM on the computer. For example, back before I used a BT client and used a DL app, if I had 3 torrents running, I had to basically wait until they were finished before I could do anything else.

The only difference in your instance is that your client is likely setting itself as a lower priority over other programs, or you have it configured to run in the background. So when you are playing a movie or game, Windows is using most of the processor for that and throttling it for the torrents.

Even if you did have more than one core or CPU, you may not see any difference in performance unless all of your programs are designed to work with more than one core properly.

If this is truly a concern, you may require the use of 2 computers, one for downloading and one for fun.