I have three machines I use to access GHCN data
Windows 7 – connected by Ethernet 600 Mbps
Mac – connected by Wifi 600 Mbps
Cheap Windows 8 laptop – connected by Wifi 1,500 Mbps
All connected to the same router.
Why is the Windows 8 box so much faster?
If you have dedicated machines for scientific work you should get some version of Linux and a FORTRAN compiler
I have a linux vm and fortran compilers. I took my first fortran class 40 years ago, and still hate the language.
I had forgotten how bad fortran was…. I just finished a small project on an ancient VAX and re-learned why we charged so much in the day. At least the hardware is reliable. That thing (the VAX) was last booted in 2004…. Fired right up and ran. (still droning in the background, and now I remember why they were kept in separate rooms too)
And your Win8 box just might have a newer model of wi-fi hardware. Certainly the drivers shouldn’t be any different. Just speculating on your symptoms in the absence of any details…. Will I get a Nobel prize for that?
How many fans has that thing gone through? I just keeping oiling a fan on a Win ’95 box that runs about 8 hrs a day since back when …
Those are originals I’m listening to…. 120VAC and loud.
Must be ball bearing .. I had a sleeve bearing fan in a GE MASTR Pro (mid 60’s manufacture 2-way xcvr) recently fail; the hub made of plastic (bakelite?) cracked due age contraction but the motor armature is still good … thing being comm gear (repeater) it runs continuously ..
The PC that controls my CNC router is only as old as 1998 but it’s been on 24 hours a day since then, having had one hard drive upgrade from 4GB to 12GB and upgrades from Windows 98 and DOS software to NT to XP and my only network is still a USB stick.
http://s6.postimg.org/607j8q19t/image.jpg
My former roommate whose dad invented DSL ran the computer help office at the math department of NYU, and he was stumped trying to analyze our connection speeds in any detail beyond searching for a less cluttered, non-default WiFi channel. Being a scientist at heart, I finally insisted on rejecting built in WiFi and got a pure router plus two separate WiFi access points with Cat 6 cable with his orange light blinking Apple router off to the side instead of as a bottleneck, so to separate the variables. That he tried creating a multiple client backup server in his bedroom was not helping. He actually rarely was around though since he secretly spent most of each month in his absent parent’s luxurious brownstone, them being happy he had finally officially moved out at age 32. He squealed a lot when he was here, playing computer games. Eventually he got a job at Dad’s new startup.
Crippling old software by optimizing updates for newer hardware isn’t exactly unheard of by computer makers. I was forced to buy a new iPhone when a system upgrade I needed nuked my WiFi reliability, and dozens of official pages of Apple inquires by others went unresolved, online.
I can get 2,500 Mbps with a cable modem, unexpectedly, since the same setup used to max out at half that, but lately my DNS name server tweaks are failing to fix a web page delay issue. And there’s no good software to debug this crap!
Had an 8″ one do that recently….. Toss the fan blade due to cracked bakelite.
Guess who epoxied that metal hub back in and is still running it?
NSA hasn’t hacked the windows 8 box yet?
What model, brand of router?
Are you up to making a Registry edit in the Win 7 box?
Prefetching, http caching, misconfigured DNS.
I don’t know, but winders ocho might have some kind of automatic or predictive prefetching going on in the background, in addition to the usual “phone home” nonsense that MS has been building into their stuff since Vista. (I don’t want to come across as too paranoid, but unless you’re comfortable with MS & NSA (& thus everybody + dog + grandmother) having access to your internet usage patterns, I wouldn’t be using MS at all. Yeah, there are other ways to track you, but I still dislike MS’s shenanigans).
As far as http caching goes, your first lookup will be slow, but if the data on the server hasn’t changed, the router (probably at your ISP) will be much faster at serving up the cached data.
Again, MS might have winders ocho’s routing set up quite differently from your Mac or siete machines. You could always set up your own DNS to avoid bottlenecks with your ISP & otherwise.
A word to wise – tuning Win 7 for maximum TCP/IP (which FTP transfers use) throughput:
windows 7 TCP/IP throughput
Provides links to such resources as this:
Windows 7, Vista, 2008 Tweaks
Tweaking Windows 7 / Vista TCP/IP settings for broadband internet connections
http://www.speedguide.net/articles/windows-7-vista-2008-tweaks-2574
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Hi, Steve.
You should use Python as a language. It is a very nice and handy for what you are doing (calculation + internet requests)
Could it be cables or hubs/switches gone bad? Try swapping the cables and see if that has an effect. Upgrade to 1 gbps hubs/switches, and new cables. Upgrade router/firewall to one with more capacity. Replace network cards. This all did wonders for my systems.
Once the software is optimized (largest packet sizes selected for the TCP for instance) the next bottleneck is the LAN card/hardware … don’t know where Steve’s choke point is with so little info given … good cables also req’d for the higher speeds e.g. 1 G LAN …
And clean air for the wi-fi? /wiseass-mode 😉
Ha ha “dry Nitrogen only” …
I have a new iMac running the 802.11ac. I tried running it with a network connector and with wifi. Couldn’t tell the difference so I just use wifi now. It streams HD video just fine. Pages load in Safari pretty much instantaneously. That said, some of the new, cheap, Windows 8 laptops have pretty fast multi-processor type chips and the latest in dual band 802.11n hardware. My new Airport Extreme runs everything faster than my old Cisco dual band router. My problem with the laptops is the hard-drives keep dying after a short time and are usually the big bottleneck for speed.
Get a otherworldcomputing.com SSD drive.
Arcane TCP parameter setting. Try TCPOptimizer.exe (Google)?
Check your device manager for the wireless adapter. It’s probably an 802.11a/b/g/n/ac. If the “ac” is there, there’s your speed.
The Windows 7 box is slow and connected by ethernet.
No, check teh W8 laptop. My bad.
Checking a few specs, your W7 Ethernet controller generally is 1Gb throughput. If the W8 has an 802.11ac Wi-Fi, it’s rated at 1Gb, but can easily double that if the router doesn’t get cluttered. I’d look at your router as being the chokepoint. You can get faster, if you’re willing to put out the bucks.
Might also check for updates for the Ethernet controller.
No-one has answered your question. You obviously have an 802,11 ac router otherwise you would not be able to achieve 1.5Gbs transfer rates. The W8 laptop of obviously recent (or it wouldn’t have W8). The 802.11 ac throughput is achieved using multiple antennas which your laptop has but the Mac (being older) doesn’t. Nothing you do to your router will have any effect on the Mac since it is probably limited to 600Mbs. Your wire to W7 is limited to 1Gbs.
Suggestion was made to look at TCP/IP protocol parameter optimization; if one assumes packet sizes and other parms are already optimized then one can move on to looking at other factors.
Most of the earlier routers I’ve seen that had two antennas did simple switching between the two antenna for receive only; even “MIMO” states the purpose is other than to simply double the throughput, as transmission impairments (multipath interference, transmit and/or receive antenna pattern nulls, etc) are always experienced in a cluttered (non-clear) radio signal environment.and the use of MIMO techniques offers means to offset those impairments through ‘space division’ and special transmit signal encoding using two antennas to gain an advantage in recovered SNR at the other end of the link, however, the random placement of most user equipment tends to always favor one antenna over the other, with the purpose of two antennas in highly portable gear to prevent the situation where *no* signal/data transfer is possible vs simply doubling the data rate. When designing line-of-site radio (microwave) links, one has the advantage that both antenna always face and ‘illuminate’ the desired receive antenna at the other ‘end’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO#Functions_of_MIMO
I forgot to mention that it’s also possible his recent laptop can do simultaneous dual band with his ac router and the 5GHz band has wider channel bandwidth.
Most of the ac routers have 3 antennas.