Help a student with mac. plz!

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Maccraft

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This is a very strange question, and not very mac related but I find mac-forums has helped me with prity much all of the other problems in my life. I'm doing a science asignment for school, any way I wanted to test the speed of three different web-browsers. (Safari, IE and fire fox.) On a 56kbps connection (nice and slow so making comparisons is easy.) Any way my teacher said that this wasn't a fair experiment because she said that the amount of people on the internet from my web provider would affect the speed. I thought this was incorect as your computer would travle at the speed it said. And when using a modem I always connect at 56kbps...ALWAYS. So I thought this made it fair but my teacher thinks different. Any way I would love to know if I'm right or not. (mind you she is anti-mac.....sigh* such an intelagent women with such a lost soul. If it helps to know who my provider are its 'optus.' A very popular and respected provider.
 
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H

Harryc

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Any way my teacher said that this wasn't a fair experiment because she said that the amount of people on the internet from my web provider would affect the speed
She is correct..partially. Page loading speed would also be impacted by the traffic flowing through any number of routers and gateways between your PC and the test site. To see them for yourself, do a traceroute between your PC and the IP address of the test site. Every time that you do one, you should see fluctuations in the ping times to these 'hops'. This will prove the theory that speed would fluctuate. Also if you run a download speed test(like the speedtests at dslreports.com), you will very rarely see the same result if run multiple times. I think to get an accurate representation of page rendering speed you'd have to set up a webserver on your local LAN. If you find a good way to get dependable results, please post your findings here.
 
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I second that:

Imagine a server sitting somewhere: If one person accesses something on there, the server can use all its bandwidth to serve that one person.
Now imagine 20 people accessing that page - they all share that same bandwidth and thus the page loads slower.

Now you have no way of finding out how many people access a single page at a time, unless you use a local server that only you can access.

This is simpler than you might think:

Go to your home folder -> Sites -> index.html
and read the instructions there. Set up a page, enable personal web-sharing.

Then hook up another computer to your mac via a network cable or wireless network and access the page you set up by entering your macs IP address in the web browser you want to test.

Presto! You can perform the test you want and avoid the problems your teacher mentioned.
 

iWhat

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I don't think your teacher is against you, because she is anti-mac... well, maybe. :eek: But I honestly think your teacher wants you to have strong facts to support what you are trying to argue. If she is the one doubting you now, just wait until she grades your project. :(

Seeing that you only have one mac, and maybe you have switched in the past (guessing :cool:), might there be a possibly of you having a spare windows machine laying around? You could base your project off of how fast a windows computer could get infected as opposed to a mac on the Internet. Throw both of the computers on the Internet exposed. Careless? Yes! Interesting? Yes!
 
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xthisisRomancex

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u can use aaron-watkins.net to test no one goes there it is where i put some files and stuff. but yea there is no traffic.
 

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