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Networking Operating Systems Software Windows IT Linux

Ubuntu Download Speeds Beat Windows XP's 515

Posted by timothy from the aggregated-circumstances dept.
narramissic writes "Doing a download speed test of his Time Warner cable connection, James Gaskin discovered something odd, something that he is quick to note isn't a rigorous benchmarked lab test. The discovery: His Ubuntu machine 'returned a rating from the Bandwidth.com test of 22-25mbps over several tests' while the same test done from a Windows XP PC returned a rating of 12-14mbps. The two computers used in the test are 'almost identical: both off-lease Compaq small form factor D515s, part of the very popular corporate desktop D500 family. Both have Pentium 4 processors running at 2GHz. The Ubuntu machine has 768MB of RAM, while the XP box has only 512MB of RAM. Both run Firefox 3 as their browser.' Gaskin's question: Can a little extra RAM make that much difference in Internet download speeds or does Ubuntu handles networking that much faster than Windows XP?"
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Ubuntu Download Speeds Beat Windows XP's More

Ubuntu Download Speeds Beat Windows XP's

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  • Even if the answer is no... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thedonger ( 1317951 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @05:54PM (#26474409)
    The test was done on machines with differing configurations, so therefore is not valid. But interesting nonetheless.

  • amazing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dirtyhippie ( 259852 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @05:55PM (#26474431) Homepage

    Clearly, there is no more reliable test of network performance than a flash application running inside of a web browser. On machines that are "oh, more or less" identical (I'd really like to know what network card is in them, for example?). Sheesh.

  • swap the ram and find out (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @05:56PM (#26474443)
    surely that is quicker than writing a /. article.

  • A bogus test (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dark grep ( 766587 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @05:57PM (#26474465)
    Great, very scientific. Swap the OS on both machines and see if the results hold. Otherwise 'almost exactly the same' doesn't cut it. Do a real test - the way it is described here is bogus. It may excite the Linux fan boi's but no one else is going to take it seriously.

  • Grats! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by dnaumov ( 453672 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:01PM (#26474565)

    You finally beat a 8 year old OS!

  • Re:amazing (Score:2, Insightful)

    by CDOS_CDOS run ( 669823 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:01PM (#26474573)
    Which with 512Mb of ram on XP it would be. I mean this article is interesting and I don't doubt that it's a true speed difference, but this isn't a great way to test it.

  • Ehm wrong site? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:02PM (#26474601)

    Shouldn't this be on fark.com or digg or some other crapcollector site? Oh wait...

  • Re:Even if the answer is no... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hansamurai ( 907719 ) <hansamurai@gmail.com> on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:03PM (#26474619) Homepage Journal

    Not to mention the ultra reliable online speed tests.

  • Re:swap the ram and find out (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sockatume ( 732728 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:03PM (#26474621)
    Let's not jump on the guy. He didn't write the /. article. He wrote a single-page blog post about something interesting he spotted. Maybe he's out swapping the RAM right now. Blame the Slashdot submitter and editors.

  • Could be the NIC (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Hottie Parms ( 1364385 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:04PM (#26474629)
    It could be the NICs on the computers. Or it could be the drivers for the NICs. Or it could be any number of different possibilities.

    This is not exactly front page material. I think people are being just a bit too eager to promote Linux as being a superior OS that this stuff gets pushed to the top. Of course, Linux is a superior OS, but still...

  • Re:Grats! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:06PM (#26474673)
    Uh, you think Vista would have faired better on less than a gig of memory? Or really any amount of memory?

  • Uh.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mikkelm ( 1000451 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:06PM (#26474677)

    Only on slashdot can you have front page articles featuring original "research" done with no controls, no baselines, dissimilar base conditions, and sample bases of one single result, and have the headline speak conclusively in favour of the observed results.

    If it makes FOSS looks good, that is. This is worse than digg.

  • Re:Even if the answer is no... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by no-body ( 127863 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:06PM (#26474683)

    Right - different OS _is_ a different configuration, with that logic all OS benchmarks are invalid.

    That Windoze's TCP/IP stack is inefficient compared to Linux has come up before, so - yawn!

  • Forget RTFA... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Darundal ( 891860 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:06PM (#26474691) Journal
    ...lets start with RTFS. Everyone here who keeps bitching about how this isn't a decent test obviously missed the bit of the summary where he admits it isn't, and he isn't asking if Uubntu is faster than Windows. He is specifically asking whether the difference is in the machines themselves or the OS.

  • Re:Even if the answer is no... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gad_zuki! ( 70830 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:08PM (#26474723)

    Who gets 22mbps from a cable modem? Regardless, Im guessing either the ubuntu machine wasnt configured to use the ISPs web proxy but the windows one was or that the windows machine's antivirus was crippling the download.

    This is a really lazy test. Didnt swap out hardware, didnt try different networks, didnt try clean installs, didnt tell us what network drivers he was using, didnt try anything really.

    Also, there's no unique thing as "downloading." Its just TCP/IP. Why not try a share on the local lan? That simplifies things quite a bit. Or at the very least get off your ass and try a different ISP.

    I want to say I'm surprised something so shoddy got on the slashdot, but I really am not that surprised. Between the lazy posts and idle stuff somehow getting loose into other sections, slashdot has gotten pretty crappy lately.

  • Re:Linux on the desktop (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hottie Parms ( 1364385 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:09PM (#26474733)
    Along the same reasoning, a good reason to switch to Linux is to avoid the malware that you get from browsing those questionable pr0n torrent sites.

    I'm not kidding.

    (Or, am I?)

  • Re:Swap the RAM. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:09PM (#26474745) Homepage

    I'd actually throw 1GB in both machines, and test both with that.

    Given that we're testing network performance, and not swap performance, I'd want to rule out swap file usage as a factor in this test. Ubuntu 8.04 and Firefox 3 will begin swapping in a machine with only 512Mb of RAM.

  • Mod parent up! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by khasim ( 1285 ) <brandioch.conner@gmail.com> on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:09PM (#26474757)

    Who cares about the boxes themselves at this point?

    The test FAILS because they're using the Internet instead of a network where they can control the other factors.

  • Right on. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:11PM (#26474789)

    This is Kool-Aid at its finest, and all the clueless morons feel the need to speculate on things they know nothing about with regard to an extremely flawed test. I really cannot wait until a coworker or two brings this up as if it actually had any merit, because it was on Slashdot. Given that Slashdot is owned by a FOSS company, it is in their (indirect) best interest to propagate misinformation such as this.

    The Internet would be a far superior place if people were banned from discussing what they didn't know. Of course, not many people would talk much, now would they?

  • Re:Even if the answer is no... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:12PM (#26474815)

    Because we all know that more RAM == more internet bandwidth right? Oh wait...

    If the machine's swapping it's not going to have a lot of room to cache that data until it's written to disk. XP is not spectacular at 512 megs.

  • Re:Dated OS? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vux984 ( 928602 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:16PM (#26474875)

    Yeah, if its a 12mbps link, and ubuntu is getting 22mbps, there is more likely something else going on than "ubuntu > xp" here.

    A lot of cable providers provide 'speed boosts' to the first bit of bandwidth you request from a given source. It makes the internet as a whole a lot snappier, while large downloads etc take about as long as usual.

    Perhaps they speed boosted his ubuntu test for some reason.

    Another possibility, is that their bandwidth analyzer isn't working properly on ubuntu and is reporting double what it should be.

    I mean, if XP was getting significantly less than his link speed and ubuntu was getting the full link speed I'd suggest bad drivers, bad cable, bad something... but XP is delivering what it should be, while ubuntu is delivering apparently more than is possible -- so my first approach would be to ensure ubuntu is REALLY getting 22mbps here, and determine how that's even possible.

    e.g. ... When you measure the speed of light and find it to be twice c, your first assumption would be that you've done something seriously wrong in calculating the result, not that you've just figured out a technique for FTL communications.

  • It has nothing to do with the ram... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ivanmarsh ( 634711 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:34PM (#26475181)

    The Linux TCP/IP stack is more effecient than the XP stack.

  • Re:Even if the answer is no... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:40PM (#26475275)

    In six minutes?

  • Re:A bogus test (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Paradigm_Complex ( 968558 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:52PM (#26475469)

    It may excite the Linux fan boi's but no one else is going to take it seriously.

    Linux fans aren't going to take it seriously either. There's no reason for them to avoid thorough, empirical testing when Linux usually comes out on top anyways.

  • Re:Even if the answer is no... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by meringuoid ( 568297 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:58PM (#26475585)
    Who gets 22mbps from a cable modem?

    My cable connection in .uk is advertised at 20Mb, and I've seen it do 18Mb on speed testers. There are many good reasons to criticise Virgin, but they don't fuck around on bandwidth. A 50Mb product is planned later this year. Even ADSL connections are available up to 16Mb now.

  • Re:Linux on the desktop (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bobzibub ( 20561 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @07:02PM (#26475645)

    Turn on Norton. ; )

  • to all you people bitching... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bkirkby ( 133683 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @07:03PM (#26475673) Homepage

    about the rigorless "research" done by the op, just pretend that the article was posted in "ask slashdot", get off your high horses and try to contribute to the discussion.

    maybe even doing some of that rigorous research yourself.

  • Re:Linux on the desktop (Score:3, Insightful)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @07:18PM (#26475873)

    Yes, speed varies over NICs, drivers and operating systems. Big deal? What network cards and if it's generic drivers or not and so on will affect this a lot.

    Why do you think that? We are talking about 25 mbps here. I am, um, "frugal" when it comes to purchasing NIC cards for my home PC, use CAT5 from ebay, put the connectors on myself (ineptly, no doubt), and always see 95+ mbps in my LAN speed tests, every time. Unlike gigabit ethernet (that never actually reaches 1000 mbps), 100 mbps actually means 100 mbps. So it would be strange if anything but the available bandwidth limited it all the way down to 25 mbps and below. It's hard for me to imagine this was anything but transient WAN network load. I realized he repeated it several times, but hey, unlikely things happen all the time.

  • Re:Even if the answer is no... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @07:22PM (#26475923) Homepage

    Right - different OS _is_ a different configuration, with that logic all OS benchmarks are invalid

    When the test is to compare different OSes, the OS is NOT part of the configuration. The OS is the variable that you are testing, which is SUPPOSED to be different. All the other possible variables, are the configuration, and those are supposed to be the same.

  • Re:Even if the answer is no... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @07:33PM (#26476053)

    Why not try a share on the local lan?

    I suppose a computer could get good bandwidth on a LAN and bad bandwidth on a WAN if its transmit buffer were too small or it wasn't sending ACKs often enough.

  • I call shenanigans (Score:1, Insightful)

    by notoriousE ( 723905 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @08:02PM (#26476369) Homepage
    To be perfectly honest, there is probably no study out there performed by a reputable research company that can show the network stack in Linux is THIS MUCH faster than the Windows network stack. In fact, I would be willing to be the driver on the Compaq running windows for the network card is the compaq-provider driver and is rather stale, or even better the NIC may be a different revision than the one in the other compaq running Linux. Also, if the download speed test was performed in Windows first, chances are that Comcast had the files cached for a quicker download if the tests were performed back to back. There are too many variables to warrant this post even being displayed, and there are no whitepapers out there that will back this performance difference.

  • Oh, come on.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Seth Kriticos ( 1227934 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @08:34PM (#26476711)
    I'm all for Windows bashing, but this is kind of ridiculous! I mean, wouldn't someone already have discovered if Windows would eat 50% of the network capacity in terms of transfer? This is probably an aging NIC or something, maybe a broken cable or the update was downloading SP4 the nineteenth time. Would be cool to use sensible configurations for this kind of test, like make the machine dual boot and test it on the same hardware before making wild assumptions. And now, please excuse me, I have to look for articles that bash Windows and have some valid points..

  • Re:Linux on the desktop (Score:3, Insightful)

    by brouski ( 827510 ) on Thursday January 15, 2009 @09:31PM (#26477233)

    Paying for porn on the interwebs? Fail.

  • Re:Linux on the desktop (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BiggerIsBetter ( 682164 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @12:06AM (#26478367)

    The problem with your test is you're running it through Flash. If you're looking to compare OS or even browser performance, better to upload and download through something lower level (unless your goal is to test Flash application network performance).

  • Re:Right Click in OS/X (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Phrogman ( 80473 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @03:23AM (#26479259)

    Except that to right-click on OS X, you need ctrl+mousebutton, which means you need two hands instead of one.

    or I can just, you know, right click as with any mouse and lo and behold! it right clicks :P

    It might *look* like there is only one button, but it actually does register right and left clicks, just like it does when I boot into XP.

    I get sick of Mac stereotypes perpetuated by people who really ought to know better.

    Oh I use my mac because its a superior environment to work and play in, not because I am some kind of OS/Hardware snob (stereotype #2) :P

  • Re:Linux on the desktop (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gazbo ( 517111 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @06:03AM (#26479939)
    Not really that strange - looking at the wild differences between avg and max speeds across the board just tells you that the speed test is too unreliable to draw conclusions from. With that sort of variance you'd probably have to run about 20 tests, discarding the outliers before averaging, before getting anything remotely representative for each platform.

    I wouldn't be at all shocked if he re-ran the exact same test and came up with a totally different ordering.

  • Re:Even if the answer is no... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by totally bogus dude ( 1040246 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @07:04AM (#26480197)

    A capital M denotes "mega" while a lowercase m denotes "milli". A capital B denotes bytes, a lowercase b denotes bits.

    Therefore, Mb is right, and Mbps is exactly right: megabits-per-second. 18mbps would be 18 millibits per second, which is not a widely used measure of bandwidth.

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