Relationship between CPU speed and broadband throughput?

[CyberSpaceCowboy]

I've heard from two local providers (one a Roadrunner over cable ISP and the other using
802.11 wireless) that I need a really fast PC to get the most throughput. That doesn't make sense to me because the information coming over a WAN
connection would be a trickle compared to the system bus of even an older computer. Even a 1mbps connection would be a tenth of the data a old 10Base-T card can feed into the system bus.

A local business has their network on the 802.11 wireless behind a VPN router (they plan to connect their various sites eventually over the ISP's WAN). The wireless is connected directly to the router. A friend who works there says their fastest computers show faster Internet connections than the older ones.

I'm in a rural area, wireless or sattelite are about my only broadband options. When I get connected, I'd like to use a 486 running Linux (no GUI) as a firewall router. Is there a real relationship between CPU clockspeed and broadband throughput? If so, is there anyway around it? I'd like to have my main computer behind a firewall, and set up another old Windows machine to be an ultra-quiet firewall so I can leave it connected all day. I'd hate to have to dedicate my fastest machine to firewall, downloads, and e-mail. This is assuming I can bear to part with $400 for installation and $60 a month

Thanks

[dmoltrup]

I would think that a fast hard drive (or two), combined with lots of RAM, would give a MUCH better speed boost than a fast processor.

I think the bottleneck is the hard drive and not much RAM struggling with storing downloaded pictures and web pages, and displaying them. Example:

1. You go to a new website
2. The computer downloads the HTML
3. Begins downloading the pictures and other contents
4. System saves pics to temporary internet folder
5. RAM overflows, so the computer puts pictures out of the current view into its virtual memory (back on hard drive)
6. As soon as you've seen visible portion, you scroll down
7. The computer has to put disappearing pictures into virtual RAM, and load newly displaying pictures back into physical RAM

Now if you have a much faster hard drive, it will be able to swap all the data faster. If you have more RAM, it will have to swap much less data.

[PIETRO]

From what I've heard it is the operating system that causes your throughput to decrease. But dmoltrup has a point...if you look it's not like you are really using your processor to it's total potential when downloading and web surfing. As a firewall all your box has to do it look a data and forward it...I don't think it is something that is going to slow you down so much you will notice.

[jrb420]

What really slows a computer down is not downloading, but displaying. I have a cable connection on my home computer (1ghz Athlon, 384MB RAM, 40GB ATA100 7200 rpm drive). The pages download much faster than they are displayed because of all the graphics and html code your computer has to process in order to display pages peoperly. You won't notice a big difference, but if you turned off the images (or ran Opera, which, as I understand it, can be set to text only) it's much faster. Using a 486 as a router shouldn't be a problem. As Pietro already stated, all your 486 has to do is redirect data, not process it. You would only notice a big slowdown if you tried to surf the net with your 486.

[michaeln]

What controls the rate at which data enters the PC are registry the registry settings for TTL RWIN MaxMTU and MSS.

When the OS is installed, these are preset, however they may not be at their optimum for your configuration. Programs such as TweekDUN from http://www.pattersondesigns.com/tweakdun/ analyse your system by communicating with an external server and then calculating the best settings for your PC.

It does enhance performance. I have found that to get the best from this you need to run it several times.

Try it and see. It's freeware.

[fishninja007]

Its all retarded. Maybe you can get a superfast computer and mess with TCP settings in the registry and all that and squeeze an extra 0.01% out of a connection, who cares. The bottleneck as you correctly state is the data transmission speed over the WAN.

If you mess with all these settings I doubt you'll see a difference in a good test. To do a good test I would think something like find a 5Mb file on a host you know is very very fast. FTP the file using a command line FTP client. Get it about 5 times noting the times. Make the changes to the settings, reboot and do it another 5 times. Change it back and do both steps again for a total of 10 gets. Now you have probably wasted more time testing this than the total of all the time that will be shaved off by the extra speed.

Note that a fast computer will make IE run faster because, well, everything will run faster with a faster computer. It has nothing to do with the broadband or network.

[jbell255]

Originally posted by fishninja007
Note that a fast computer will make IE run faster because, well, everything will run faster with a faster computer. It has nothing to do with the broadband or network.

Fishninja is right. I have AT&T Mediacom cable internet running at 1.9 - 2mbps (i used to get 2.6mbps with @home until they went bankrupt ). The only problem is I'm running a pII 400mhz, 256mb pc133, and a really slow removable 8.47gb hdd. As you may expect, the internet itself is fast... its opening IE and running it that slows the process down. It seems to take about 3-5 seconds to open IE even before my comp can start requesting data from the modem, so it kind of neglects the point of having fast internet if you have a **** comp.