Is this possible

Macker

With a 56k

3,338,744 bytes transferred in 00:03:05, 18,047 bytes/sec


Macker

leeroybrown

No,

Its an illusion caused by hard disk caching.

The file you d/l'ed must have been partially cached in a Temp folder on the machine you're using. When you started the d/l it was found and sed as the d/l.

sutty

If it was IE you where using to download the file, when the Save the file to disk pop up, it starts to downloading the file, so when you have clicked save file.......it already has some of it in the temp dir of IE.

Macker

Thanks guys but I was using FTP so there was none cached ,It was the first time I had been on that particular site and downloaded to a empty folder on my hdd

Macker

Meh

Could be the modem compression. Works quite well on large ascii files.

sutty

Alow me to put it like this, the top speed a 56k modem will ever do is 7kb/s.......and you will never get that due to noise and the line you use you will be lucky to get over 5.5kb/s.


It was what ever program you used ether..

A) screwing up big time.
Doing some cashing.

Inspector Gadget

...it depends.

FTP transfers can be very efficient (especially if it's known that the file is text):

1. If the FTP server and client agree on 7-bit transfers (as standard ASCII text doesn't require the 8th bit - it only uses characters 0-127. Extended character sets, Unicode etc. are another kettle of fish) they can transfer eight 7-bit bytes of data for every seven 8-bit bytes sent (8*7-bit = 7*8-bit = 56 bits); that's a 14%-odd speed increase on its own.
2. Modem compression is very, very good with text; anything with a lot of repetition, in particular, can regularly achieve compression ratios as high as 50%. This isn't limited to text data; just repetitive stuff.

You won't get this sort of speed when transferring already-compressed files (such as JPEG/MPEG/GIF/ZIP/RAR etc.), but some files will compress quite nicely.

A calculator I found for this type of stuff (at http://www.manx-telecom.com/internet/downloadcalc.asp) estimates that a file of that size will download (on average) in just shy of eight minutes (7:56, actually). That means that the download was being compressed (all told) to about 39% of its original size.

It's not common, but not impossible...
Gadget

Macker

Thanks Gadget

You're right it was a text file

Macker