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Forum Discussion
No parallel download due to poor router choice?
For my work I use vim, which is a text editor that supports plugins. One of the plugins is a "master" plugin that manages all plugins, i.e. downloads them. There are several plugin managers like "...
Retired_Member wrote:
- Bad, newer router: NETGEAR R6120
Strange that you should have the R6120 as a "newer router". It may be just a few years old, from 2019, but it it at least a decade behind the times in its network technology. It is shameful that Netgear still sells this relic.
According to Netgear's manual for the R6120, not always the most reliable source of information, the LAN and WAN ports support only 10BASE-T or 100BASE-TX. That makes it slower than many newer internet services and most modern network hardware. This may not matter to you, but be warned that it will hobble you if you ever sign up for faster Internet, anything faster than 100 Mbps is a waste of your money.
It also slows down whatever is going on in your local network. Newer devices support at least 1000BASE-TX. That includes your modem, which can feed your router at 1000 Mbps. Neither of your routers can take that traffic.
No surprise, then, that things are slow on your network. It looks like the TP-Link WR841N is equally slow.
You don't say how fast your Internet connection is, but your hardware seems to be well behind the curve. If speed is important to you, it might be a good time to get something a bit more up to date.
Since both routers are equally slow then why does the older one update plugins much faster?
My internet speed is 100Mbps anyway, so it doesn’t make a difference.
when I said the router was “newer” I meant it was newer compared to the tp link. I never said I bought it recently either. That is off topic though. The question was why does one router download plugins in parallel which is older but the newer one does not have that function. It doesn’t impair anything else in the network.
Retired_Member wrote:
My internet speed is 100Mbps anyway, so it doesn’t make a difference.
I'm afraid it does. When the router says it can handle 100 Mbps on the $Ethernet connection, that means that if you take account of the usual overhead, it probably maxes out at 90-95 Mbps.
Then there is the fact that some ISPs have a habit of "over-provisioning" their service. They say they will deliver 1000 Mbps, but this often means 110 Mbps, sometimes even higher.
Don't forget, that 100 Mbps has to handle more than one traffic stream. If two things on your network want to talk to each other at 100 Mbps. there just ain't enough bandwidth there.
As your complaint is all about the speed at which things happen, it seems to be a bit perverse to use hardware that is guaranteed to act like a roadblock.
Then again, I can't recall reading anything here from people complaining about "parallel download". That is not a phrase that appears anywhere in the 1200 or so Netgear manuals and documents I have on file.
How is a difference between 90Mbps and 110Mbps going to change the download times from 20s to 1s? This is clearly not the culprit. You said both routers are equally slow, and I agree, but one is definitely 16x to 20x slower in certain cases. The speed test shows the exact same speed and latency for both. And I only have 1 device connected.
I found that if I add the following line to my /etc/hosts
140.82.121.4 github.com
to bypass the DNS lookup it downloads much faster (around 2s). This router has some issue with DNS lookups but I don't understand it fully. I didn't have to create manual entries on my computer with the TP-Link router to achieve fast downloads.
All the plugin manager does is download a bunch of repositories from github.com but can't do it fast when using the "github.com" URL, that's why I had to switch to the IP version.
Using DNS servers like 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, or the one provided by my ISP changes nothing.