Browsing Speed?

[aprisa]

I have 8mb Broadband at work and 1mb at home, yet the home browser seems to change pages and initiate pages much quicker than work?

Obviously once downloading something, work is very much faster but what is it that causes explorer to have a delay before loading a page?

I use the same sites on both, home is BT and work is Bulldog.

Any reasons?

Cheers
Nick

[malman]

lazy dns server

[thepassenger]

DNS server overloaded, proxy/cache system? Perhaps even a different revision of plug-in slowing down page rendering....

[aprisa]

Can I have that in English please

Does that mean I am powerless to change it or can I tweak?

Thanks
Nick

[rsvmilly]

aprisa said:

Can I have that in English please

Does that mean I am powerless to change it or can I tweak?

Thanks
Nick

I think the general PH consensus will be to nuke it from space! It's the only way to be sure!

[thepassenger]

aprisa said:

Can I have that in English please

Does that mean I am powerless to change it or can I tweak?

Thanks
Nick

Ugh! *bonk bonk*

DNS server being overloaded. DNS handles changing www.pisonheads.com into 195.225.218.139 and vice versa.
If the DNS server is busy, then resolving names and getting to websites will be a little slow.

Cache/Proxy. Proxies and Cache systems are used by both ISP's and companies to help reduce bandwidth; basically any commonly accessed page gets stored for a certain amount of time and when you access it the cache presents the page contant rather than the host. Video tape for internet if you will.
However if the cache doesn't have the page or it's a page that can't be cache'd then you might get a small delay between the request, the cache checking and reporting 'no' and then the page comming from the host itself.

Plug-in's handle various things. Flash animation for example is a plug-in that Internet Explorer and Firefox download. Slightly different revisions of these plug-ins could cause delays in rendering a page (interpreting HTML, XHTML, images and such).

Alternativley it could well be the fact that the host itself is busy; pistonheads for example slows down quite considerably during lunch and evenings when everyone jumps on. Web servers can only listen to a finite amount of connections; say 300 as an example. It only takes a second to send a page; so if 301 people all appear someone has to wait a few seconds extra, once your downloading something your connection doesn't cycle until the file has finished (usually).

If it's just some websites then there is very little you can do; however if the entier system is running sluggish, stuttering and otherwise misbehaving whilst surfing best advice is to poke in to one of the Spyware threads and follow the advice in them about checking/cleaning a system out.

Edited by thepassenger on Wednesday 16th August 19:44

[aprisa]

Many thanks for the detailed post, I'll make sure I run regular spyware and check times of usage to compare.

Cheers

[deva link]

Nobody mentioned contention.

At home, there's probably a 50:1 contention ratio - basically 50 of your neighbours all connected to the same point in your local telephone exchange.

Do your access times vary according to the time of day? I work from home and it used to be very noticeable around about 4.00PM as kids arrive home from school.

There's so many bottlenecks in the Internet that, for normal Internet page browsing, your download speed (once you're on broadband) is close to irrelevant.

How are you connecting at home? Using a wireless link often slows things down a bit, or if you're directly connecting using a USB modem then that's not the fastest way.

Edited by deva link on Thursday 17th August 15:58