Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

I am running 64-bit Fedora core 5 and attempted to download core 6. The download (FireFox browser) took about 8 hours and when done the file could not be saved :mad: I know it is not for lack of disk space -- fedora is installed on a 320 gig hard drive, and the os is almost the only thing on it.

This morning I rebooted to 32-bit MS-Windows XP and again downloading the file with Firebox browser. But this time 71% of the file has finished downloading in just one hour.

If linux (Fedora) is supposed to be so wounderful and better than MS-Windows, why does its file downloads suck cannel water:eek: And why could it not save that 3 gig file?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by sn4rf3r

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A short, practical checklist to narrow this down. reported a 3 GB download that completed much faster under Windows; replies by , and touched on mirror/load, browser/temporary-file behavior, NIC speed and 64-bit driver issues. Rather than assume the OS is to blame, isolate three areas: write path (where the browser stores partial files), kernel/filesystem limits, and the network/driver layer.

Start with storage and process limits. Confirm the target filesystem and free space and whether a tmpfs or small partition is being used for temporary files. Check shell limits (file-size ulimits) which can silently stop large writes:

df -h /path/to/download
mount
ulimit -a

If a file-size limit is present, raise it in the session that launches the browser.

Next, look at networking and driver symptoms. Duplex mismatch, driver bugs or kernel error messages often cause huge throughput drops or corrupt writes. Inspect link state and recent kernel logs, and get the NIC/driver info:

ethtool eth0
dmesg | tail -n 50
lspci -nnk | grep -A3 -i ethernet

Replace eth0 with the actual interface name. If the logs show repeated errors or a negotiated speed of 10 Mb/s, that points at link/driver problems or bad cabling.

Finally, rule out disk/hardware faults and verify write integrity. A controlled write-test and checksum will show whether large files can be created and read back:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/download/testfile bs=1M count=1024
sync
md5sum /path/to/download/testfile

(remove the test file afterward). Examine dmesg for I/O errors after the test.

If the network looks fine but downloads still fail, try a different kernel/driver or boot a live image to compare behavior; if the disk test fails, focus on hardware/partitioning. These steps will identify whether the problem is an application quirk, a filesystem/limit issue, or a driver/hardware fault.

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Member Avatar for pty

I am running 64-bit Fedora core 5 and attempted to download core 6. The download (FireFox browser) took about 8 hours and when done the file could not be saved :mad: I know it is not for lack of disk space -- fedora is installed on a 320 gig hard drive, and the os is almost the only thing on it.

This morning I rebooted to 32-bit MS-Windows XP and again downloading the file with Firebox browser. But this time 71% of the file has finished downloading in just one hour.

If linux (Fedora) is supposed to be so wounderful and better than MS-Windows, why does its file downloads suck cannel water:eek: And why could it not save that 3 gig file?

So cos firefox broke your download you conclude that linux isn't very good.

If you want to download using http use wget. You'd be better off using bittorrent though, you'll get good download speeds and most good clients check the segments of file they download to make sure corruption doesn't occur.

Also you're comparing download speeds that are potentially from two different mirrors (?) at different times on different days. The fact that you did it on different operating systems probably has nothing to do with it.

Member Avatar for jbennet

also linux may not be unleashing the full potential of your network card (my thinkpad only runs at 10mbs under fedora for some reason)

note: dont use 64 bit linuxes unless its on a server, theres less programs for it and sometimes odd things like this happen and dont say "but windows 64 bit is fine" because its not it hardly works

Member Avatar for sn4rf3r

did you try wget or ftp from the command line? also what your nic set to? 10baseT, 100baseTX??
sounds more like a networking problem to me

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