Return
to Story Page
To print: Select File and then Print from your
browser's menu
Nitya Jacob
"The site is incredibly slow". "I can't get the site to open". "The VSNL connection breaks before anything downloads." Sounds familiar. You've more to blame than only the Internet Service Provider-- a slow server, graphics heavy site or simply Internet traffic.
The main reason the Net is slow is that it wasn't designed to handle the volume of traffic that now flows across its wires. The United States' (and by extension, the world's) high-speed Internet lines are all interconnected through five major hubs that run at a capacity of 800 mbps; that's not nearly enough. It can't clear up the hub bottleneck; traffic flow is in the hands of the Internet backbone providers.
But you can help yourself by using a few simple procedures and tools to diagnose slowdowns and speed things up on a Windows 95 system. You may not go from 0 to 60 in under 10 seconds, but every little bit of speed helps. To tune up your Net connection, you need the proper tools. The first three tools on this list help diagnose what's wrongwith your connection, so you can figure out where to concentrate your efforts. The next six help speed things along, either by tweaking your Windows 95 settings or by putting your idle modem to work. The last two help keep your software and utilities up-to-date.
Take Net.Medic, a demo software that lasts 30 days. The licensed version is about Rs 1,500. This monitors your Internet connection and tells you all about it--reporting everything from your ISP's overall performance to the slowest sites you visit. It's great for identifying bottlenecks or monitoring on-line vital signs, and while it can't fix problems, it makes sound recommendations.
Then there is Starfish Internet Utilities. Dubbed "the Internet survival kit," Starfish's package provides more than 25 utilities to maximize Web efficiency, including tools to pinpoint Internet connection problems. The licensed version is about Rs 1,200; it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee -- not much help in India, though.
Dial-Up Networking 1.2,Microsoft's latest dial-up networking upgrade, includes all the features of the ISDN Accelerator Pack, plus additional security features. This tool can be used to monitor any dial-up network connection. The best part is that it's free. No catches there, from Bill Gates.
TweakDUN 2.0 is a programme that can dramatically boost dial-up connections. The mechanics are highly technical; basically, it works by optimizing several of Windows 95's networking settings-maximum transmission unit (MTU), return window (RWIN), and time-to-live (TTL). This translates into performance gains of up to 30 per cent. In other words, a 28.8 kbps speed modem can run at 36 kbps. The programme costs about Rs 500.
MTU-Speed 4.03, like TweakDUN, enables you to optimise some ugly networking entries in Windows 95's Registry without tinkering with the Registry itself. The results? Most people get much faster dial-up connections. MTU-Speed is a little cleaner and simpler to use than TweakDUN or PPP Boost. And it's free.
Net Lightening1.1.2 is a handy-dandy little tool lets you make the same network connection tweaks as TweakDUN, MTU-Speed, and PPP Boost with a one-button click. Its help system doesn't explain what it's doing very well, but Net Lightening has another valuable trick up its sleeve; it lets you speed up connections to favourite Web sites and assign them aliases by caching their IP addresses. The developer asks that you send in a $5 donation for a full license; contact info is provided.
PeakJet 1.5 lets your PC make the most of the time your modem is idle -- that is, all the time you spend reading on-line material, which probably accounts for about 90 per cent of your browsing session. PeakJet looks at all the links on the page you're viewing and puts those connected pages in your cache. Then when you click a link, the page is already loaded. This method is basically an illusion of speed rather than a real performance improvement, but it helps. PeakJet works best if you browse with images turned off. The manufacturer claimsPeakJet can accelerate your surfing as many as five times, but the software requires a fast PC to work well. A 30-day demo license is free; a full license costs Rs 1,200.
Blaze Web Performance Pack 1.5 is basically the same as PeakJet and likewise requires some system clout to work well. But Blaze also provides the client half of Datalytics' xSpeed, a technology that helps Web servers speed up compression/ decompression and encapsulation. That technique works well, but only with sites where Webmasters have implemented xSpeed, and that's not too many. This software costs Rs 1,500.
Net.Medic's History Reports have an option that graphs the slowest sites, giving you a picture of a site's overall performance and letting you distinguish between a chronically slow site and a site just having a bad day. The Best Case bar shows how the site performs when it has the fewest delays. The Average bar indicates how the site performs most of the time.
The Worst Case bar shows how the site performs when it's sufferingfrom the highest delays. Here, the site with the monolithic block on the left of the screen is consistently slow -- it has long delays at its best and its worst times. The rest of the sites in the screen just had bad spikes here and there. The site on the far right of the screen has some delays during its worst times but almost none during its best times.
If you're getting six-second-plus response delays consistently, you've found a chronically unresponsive site, and it's time to alert the site's Webmaster.The solution for a site with occasional bad spikes is to visit the site during off-peak hours, or use an off-line browser, which surfs for you and moves pages to your hard drive before you actually want to read them. Or you can contact the site's Webmaster and find out whether the site has a mirror, an exact copy created to divert traffic from the original site.
Another option is to check whether your ISP uses a proxy server, a system that speeds access by locally caching pages from Web sites. If yourISP uses a proxy server, call the ISP to make sure you're hooked up to it.
If the problems stem from your end -- such as CPU and memory overload on your PC -- Net.Medic's Health Report will tell you so. The report below points the finger at you (the client) and your PC:
If you don't have Net.Medic or the Starfish Internet Utilities, you can use a quick Ping for a quick-and-dirty Web site check. Ping is a little Net program that sends a 32-byte signal to the Web site's host server. Ping then records the time the server takes to respond. If that time creeps over 400 milliseconds (ms), the Web site or your connection can be officially declared sluggish. Please note: the farther you are from a major Internet hub, the slower you should expect your response times to be. If you're in Australia, for example, your Ping responses may be routinely slower than 400ms.
Ping will show you the results of four tests. Any time less than 300ms is normal. More than 400ms is slow. A "Request timed out" message means thatthe site didn't respond within a second, which indicates that either the server configuration does not to respond to Ping, or else the connection is really, really slow.
Internet speeds, then, are a combination of computer speeds and Internet connections. Use one of the tools and processes here to check out what's wrong, instead of blaming bad phone lines.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
------------------------------------------------------------
This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
------------------------------------------------------------