Also:

On Wed, 4 Aug 1999, G.W. Willman, IV wrote:
>
> Just because I was interested, I did a little network watching: zoning
> generally spews out an odd 300k of data each time for normal density zones,
> high density ones (NRO in particular) are closer to 700k. You might be
> tempted to think wow, with a DSL I can zone in 10 secs! But you also have
> the overhead associated with loading the new zone data from disk, which is
> time consuming in and of itself. If you have a new computer, chances are

I suspect most of the time to zone is spent uncompressing that
data being sent from the server. This was also the case for
Diablo - copying the CD to hard disk only helped to a point,
but upgrading the CPU helped tremendously.

FWIW, on my cable modem and 450 Celeron (OC) with 128MB RAM,
it takes from 15-35 seconds to zone.

> Now, on to ping. Its just not that great of an indication. Speaking from
> experience (I'm a network programming and sysadmin), opening a socket is FAR
> more reliable. I've got a really quick and dirty pong program which does
> just this as well as dumping out oodles of other interesting network info.

However, comparing ping times for the same route (assuming
relatively constant Internet traffic) using two different
modems *will* tell you the relative performance of those two
modems, since the times across all the other hops should stay
roughly the same.

--
John H. Kim
kim@...