WHAT THE...

[chopin1810]

So I'm downloading the Darwin UNIX ISO from Apple's web site, and I look at the download manager window: I'M DOWNLOADING 200 KILOBYTES PER SECOND ON DIALUP!!! I wait twenty minutes and the rate goes back to normal. The funny thing is... it actually was downloading 200 KB per second for a minute there. WHAT'S UP WITH THIS???

[josolanes]

i've heard of something called a burst download speed....atleast with cable, you can get up to 1 meg/sec constantly for a short period of time, then it'll level off to where it normally would be.

200 kb/s on dialup is a lot though...

[Fallen Angel]

Now, that would be really cool, I'm using dial-up also

[DoctorDan]

ive gotten the burst DL speed its pretty tight

[chopin1810]

O-kay, this is really really weird, almost scary, the same thing is happening with all of my other downloads... does anybody have an explanation???

[bigtomrodney]

You're getting Darwin on dial up? Isn't that about 300MB?

[chopin1810]

Yes, but really I don't much mind. I've done FreeBSD, Vector Linux, and NetBSD all on dialup too.

[Odd_Bloke]

If it's at the start and it isn't your first attempt, then sometimes it'll 'download' the stuff from cache at a high rate (especially if you have a local server, but not only then).

[Fallen Angel]

There is a way to set this but on Windows. This tehnique is called modem uncapping.

[deek]

I had always heard that this was just a incorrect displaying issue. I mean, right at the start, there are a lot of things going on, so the CPU is at or above normal high load. So, maybe you downloaded 100K in 3-5 seconds, the timing internally, kinda froze up due to CPU being busy, so what is displayed is, say the 100K downloaded in 1 or 2 seconds.

So, you really only got the 100K in 5 seconds (meaning 20K/s) but because of delay, your PC is calculating 100K in 1 second (menaing 100K/s)...which looks really fast, but really is just a calculation error.

Like I said, I had always thought that and been told that was the case...

Its just like when I was installing Mac OS X on an old laptop. The installation status started and said it would be 4 hours (yeah, I know, pretty slow), then after about 15 minutes, it dropped to about 45 minutes, then about 20 minutes later is showed 80 minutes...et cetera. When all was said and done, it took my laptop about 75 minutes to install...