You can diagnose if a web site is slow, your connection
is slow, or your computer
is slow.
When your browser is loading a page, the logo at the top of the window
flashes to indicate the download is in progress, and statistics describing
how the transfer is progressing are displayed on the bottom window border.
A page of text takes on average about a 1,000 characters or bytes. A graphic
is on average about 10,000 characters, or 10 KB, and can be up to 100 KB
or more. Therefore, pictures take an order of magnitude more space than
text, and take longer to download.
For comparison purposes, the number of seconds it takes to download data
of various sizes with Internet connections of various speeds is shown in
the table below.
Time in Seconds
|
Modem
56 kbps
|
ISDN
128 kbps
|
T1
1.544 Mbps
|
DSL
5 Mbps
|
Text
1000 B |
0.143
|
0.0625
|
0.00518
|
0.0016
|
Text/Picture
10 KB |
1.43
|
0.625
|
0.0518
|
0.016
|
Picture
100 KB |
14.3
|
6.25
|
0.518
|
0.16
|
Audio/Video
1 MB |
142
|
62.5
|
5.18
|
1.6
|
Application
10 MB |
1428
|
625
|
51.8
|
16
|
If you find that page loading is taking longer than it should even for
text pages, consider the following possibilities:
- Site slow. If just one site is slow, then there is nothing
you can do about it because the site itself is the cause.
- Connection slow. If all sites are slow, and it happens more
at certain times of the day, then your Internet Service Provider or the
Internet itself are slowing down under higher loads. Try using the ping and traceroute programs
to diagnose the connections to various sites. If the delays are excessive
on all sites then the cause is likely your Internet Service Provider,
because even under very heavy loads the Internet backbone usually
continues to provide good performance.
- Browser slow. There are no known browser configurations that
can slow normal operation, although some can be configured to not download
images, which can speed up operation on slow connections.
- Computer slow. If all sites are slow all the time, even
for the speed of your Internet connection, then you should check and make
sure that you have the proper modem configuration, hardware connections,
driver and connection installations, and other options. You can check
with your Internet Service Provider for correct connection settings.
If you are hearing a lot of disk activity during the times that the response
is slow, you may need to defragment your disk, or you may need more RAM
memory, which is often one of the best ways to speed up a computer.