CPU & downloading???

[hendew69]

A friend and I are having this discussion... Does the amount of download (at one time) use the CPU greatly or not? In other words, if I'm downloading a lot of files at high speeds would it slow my computer's CPU down any/a lot/some? Thanks!!!

 

[Rugger]

I don't think you would see a significant CPU slowdown with a simple download. The major bottleneck would be the internet connection and then writing to the hard drive. The easiest way to test that would be to open up the task manager while doing the download and check CPU usage.

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[Crashman]

I had a file server at 20 megabits up/20 down, constant peak use, running Windows 95 and a Pentium 166MMX. It worked FINE, except for a bug in Windows 95 (it ran much worse with newer OS's due to the OS load on the CPU and RAM).

So this type of network activity has very little affect on processor usage.

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[TheRod]

If you're worried about that, use QoS.

QoS is not very efficient in a non-controlled environnement like the Internet. If you can set QoS rules in your PC, you can control the trafic shaping that is going out of your PC, but what is coming from the Internet can only be controlled to a limited extent.

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[Guest]

And the only reason your CPU might get lots of work would essentially be with on-board NIC creating some overhead on the CPU. Even then it doesnt reach much more than 10%-15% use and thats trnasfering over a gigabit lan...Hd is the real bottleneck

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[dunklegend]

The P2P programs will slow your CPU to some extent but I have seen that is the searching of a file that uses more CPU than the actual downloading.

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[plenkor]

I think the consensus is right... in actual terms, all the downloads you can possibly squeeze through your broadband connection won't tax your CPU and disk that much.

However, the perceived responsiveness of your system may depend on your internet connection, which will be sluggish during downloads. For example, if you click a link in your web browser that usually comes up immediately, it would be easy to mistake the additional time it takes to establish the http connection as sluggishness on the part of your computer.

But SPEC95 or the like will probably show the about same score, downloads or not.

 

[earthling]

CPU usage while downloading depends on the application you're running for the download, in most cases downloading applications doesn't require that load on CPU, it will just lessen the bandwidth performance, yet doesn't mean that the CPU is being stressed

 

[TheRod]

QoS is great in controlled networks where ALL the equpment between the sender and the receiver are aware of the "QoS rules". The Internet equipment (routers, switches, etc...) do not consider or read the ToS/QoS values and rules. I work for an ISP/Data Carrier and we offer QoS only to customers who have Point 2 point links, in those cases we control 100% of the network between our customer endpoint, this ensure a reliable and efficient way to apply and support QoS rules.

If you send data packet that are TAGGED "high-priority" over the Internet most equipments will not even consider "reading" that information from the packets and some other equipments might even rewrite your packet to remove ANY trace of QoS. And why some equipments would do so? To ensure that THEY control/limit the use of QoS to specific customers or application. Because how QoS would be useful if 95% of the packets would be TAG as "high-priority". QoS must be limited to mission-critical apps./service, usually we apply QoS to VOICE DATA, "money" related apps., configuration and managament data, business database.

But the best QoS that exist is to overprovision a network, if a server use 45Mbps of bandwidth and you make use it can use 100Mbps on your network, you'll never need QoS.

I could go on and on about QoS... But I stop here!

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[hendew69]

Thanks! Everyone. All makes sense now... ;-)