My Computer is the New Bottleneck
July 25th, 2008I decided to download and install Ubuntu 8.04 into a Virtualbox virtual machine last night and something funny occurred to me for the first time.
In the past with slow internet connections it would take many hours to download a 694 MB iso file (even at 2Mbps it would take 46 minutes) but with my 25Mbps connection it took about 4 1/2 minutes! Then I stared the installation, my laptop hard drive chugged away at 4200 rpm while the processor struggled to uncompress the iso. In all it took about 30 minutes to install, so actually downloading the iso file was about 7 times faster than the installation procedure! How times have changed.
Systems always have a bottleneck and any system can only process data at the rate of the weakest (slowest) link. Upgrading computers and networks always involves replacing one slow link with another. In my own network I’m in a constant process of up replacing each new bottleneck as it appears.
Right now I have 2 devices with gigabit network cards but both my laptop and router are limited to 100Mbps so everything runs at 100mbps. The next step is to replace the router with a gigabit wireless N version (maybe the D-Link DIR-655) and then replace the laptop.