How to speed up 4.2's internet connection?

Using applications, configuring, problems
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johnbrush
Posts: 16
Joined: Sat 23 May 2009, 15:18

How to speed up 4.2's internet connection?

#1 Post by johnbrush »

Using Puppy 4.2 from the CD, just saving the pupsave and the pup4.20 files on the hard drive. Don't know what you all call that, but its what I am doing for now as I check it all out.

Knocking down the issues one by one, thanks to the help from here, and all the writeups and web sites.

Next up is the internet connection. I use Comcast, 6mbits, and it runs about that fast with my windows 2000 and XP systems, so I know it can be done, but Puppy is slow, too slow to stream full screen video on places like Fancast, which I use often.

I did have to do some registry tweaks for windows to max out the speed, so now I think I have some work to do with Puppy to get it running fast. Downloads are slower overall, as well as web page loading, which is an impediment to me ditching windows. Don't want to go slower. That makes no sense.

There are utilities for windows, as well as pretty good numbers of tweaks and hacks that speed things up. How do I do the same with Puppy?

Gotta have my online streaming video to watch those TV shows I can't get without CATV :-)

Much obliged for pointers, utils, and information on how to tweak the Puppy's internet connection speeds.

P.S. Using online speedtest web sites with Comcast is stupid and a waste, so please don't bring that sore point up as a solution or even a test :-) They use that dopey power burst, which even in windows gives speedtest.net and others fits, as it shows I have a 20mbit connection for the ten seconds it takes to run the test, but "power boost" is a waste, and gives bogus numbers for the first 15 secs or so of any download.

I use large files over several minutes, from various repositories to validate my true connection speeds.

thanks in advance, plus thanks for all the other help as well.

John

Doglover

4.2 speedup

#2 Post by Doglover »

The kind folks over at http://dslreports.com may[/url]may be able to help you in the Unix forums.

johnbrush
Posts: 16
Joined: Sat 23 May 2009, 15:18

Re: 4.2 speedup

#3 Post by johnbrush »

Doglover wrote:The kind folks over at http://dslreports.com may[/url]may be able to help you in the Unix forums.
thank you.

I did go there, and saw how to set my MTU, which was always at 1500 to begin with. I searched quite a bit across the net (can't ever say I saw it all <g>) and there is no discussion of it that I could find.

This means linux cannot be tweaked for fastest internet, (particularly puppy, because Ubuntu doesn't have a problem streaming videos on my connection) which makes it quite useless, so oas usual, I thought I was steamrolling towards finally making the switch out of windows hell, but once again, linux comes up short in areas that matter the most.

I will keep an eye out. One day, perhaps it will be dealt with. Meanwhile, back to win2K.

Much obliged,

John

degoba
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon 22 Jun 2009, 03:53
Location: St. Paul, Minnesota

#4 Post by degoba »

How much ram is in the system?

dawnsboy

#5 Post by dawnsboy »

I have an Eeepc 701 4G "overclocked" to 900MHz. I use 4.12 (bare) as my day to day OS and I install (frugal) other versions alongside 4.12 to check them out. I have recently or currently have 4.21, 2.14x4, dpup, upup and variants like NOP. I have used Opera, Firefox and Seamonkey on these setups and I am able to watch video on each of them when on AT&T Yahoo dsl. I have the basic service (slowest dsl package available) and I use flash player 10.22.87 (sites like fancast are flash videos). I have also been able to watch various streaming TV broadcasts using PupTV and mplayer without any issues.

I used to watch video at Fancast then they switched to a Windows compatible player. A message would appear in the location that the player would normally appear stating that their player would only work with Microsoft Windows. No matter I just switched to hulu.com. Fancast had been using the hulu player anyway (until they switched to windows only player).

I did re-visit Fancast moments ago after reading your post and tried to load a video in my browser. Much to my surprise it did load and start. However the picture is extremely poor, the video is very slow and the soundtrack while audible is distorted.

I can however watch programs over at hulu.com. If I had to guess I would say in this case the problem is with Fancast given the fact that I have no problem on my little underpowered unit pulling in Hulu.com and programming over at TBS in addition to streaming broadcasts of various TV Stations.

EDIT:

It would be interesting to know your hardware specs. The system requirements for adobe flash player are much higher in Linux than they are in windows.

johnbrush
Posts: 16
Joined: Sat 23 May 2009, 15:18

#6 Post by johnbrush »

dawnsboy wrote:
It would be interesting to know your hardware specs. The system requirements for adobe flash player are much higher in Linux than they are in windows.
Thanks.

3.0 Pentium P4, 1G Ram, ATI All In Wonder w/512M on an Intel Motherboard.

All the usual sites run great on Windows, including hulu (good point to check it tho) fancast, and youtube. Windows 2K is my base OS, and I use XP to view moves on Netflix. All is well with any of them, but when I am in Puppy, Youtube is a joke, and hulu/fancast are too slow for anything but small screen and poor video.

In addition, web pages load slower, and downloads are noticeably slower. Not just one, but any time I get a big file.

I waited years to get from a modem to broadband :-) and am not going back to dialup speeds, no matter how good Puppy is, and it is a great distro.

I also can boot Ubuntu, and it has no issues with the video streaming either.

Not versed in the lingo yet, but Puppy boots from the CD, and saves the two files on the hard drive. That is how I run it. I wouldn't expect any difference if I did a full install, but I suppose anything is possible. Perhaps when I get a chance.....

Still, I would be suprised to learn that there is no way to tweak the settings for broadband connections somewhere in linux. Everything else is in there, somewhere :-)

Much obliged for the input.

John

dawnsboy

#7 Post by dawnsboy »

@johnbrush

Clearly your hardware specifications exceed that of my little netbook. I wonder why I am able to view videos in Puppy that you are having so much difficulty with?

Puppy Linux in all of its various editions provides a faster computing experience than windows can on this netbook. For me file download speeds in Puppy are identical to download speeds in Windows XP (which I no longer use).

I can say that I had Comcast in the past and had issues with them but nothing like those that you are reporting. You should be able to do all those things in Puppy Linux as well as windows.

Did Puppy recognize and load your network card when you setup your internet connection?

degoba
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon 22 Jun 2009, 03:53
Location: St. Paul, Minnesota

#8 Post by degoba »

I concur with Dawnsboy. It sounds like the problem may be with your network card. It could be that Puppy is using an older or generic driver. Definitely worth checking out.

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mikeb
Posts: 11297
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#9 Post by mikeb »

dopey power burst,
might be an issue..

You are not using ndiswrapper are you <-- dumb question

definately have the same or better speeds on linux/puppy compared to 2000 when direct to a dsl modem...through a router pretty much the same.

Some cpu hogging going on perhaps..if severe that would cramp network performance.

There's a lack of tweaking info as its not usually needed

mike

degoba
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon 22 Jun 2009, 03:53
Location: St. Paul, Minnesota

#10 Post by degoba »

I just compared my download speeds. Puppy was downloading at the same speed as my Windows partition over wireless. I would start by making sure that Puppy is using the correct or most current driver.

johnbrush
Posts: 16
Joined: Sat 23 May 2009, 15:18

#11 Post by johnbrush »

degoba wrote:I just compared my download speeds. Puppy was downloading at the same speed as my Windows partition over wireless. I would start by making sure that Puppy is using the correct or most current driver.
I would be happy to do that.

Sadly, I was not born with the inherent knowledge as to how to go about checking that. So many linux users think everyone knows where everything it, its just amazing anything gets accomplished <g>

Much obliged for pointers, and it was just dry sarcasm, not an attempt to insult anyone. Hope you understand.

John

degoba
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon 22 Jun 2009, 03:53
Location: St. Paul, Minnesota

#12 Post by degoba »

It's all good. I am unfamiliar with busybox so am fumbling around a bit myself.

A any rate. Trying to find the right linux drivers for hardware takes searching. There is seldom a single place to look for drivers although a search of these forums is probably the best start.

Since I am unfamiliar with busybox I cant get you to your loaded drivers via command line. However via Gui simply open the internet connection wizard. There should be a device called eth0 listed. Next to it there should be a module listed along with a description etc etc. The module is the 'driver' that is loaded.

The next thing to do is search the net with the device name and the kernal module to determine if there are any updates, better written modules, etc. Like I said. A search of these forums would be a good place to start. The forums of the hardware manufacturer would be another.

With luck you will find it in a PET package. If not then you will need to load it manually. Or build a PET package.

mill0001
Posts: 358
Joined: Thu 01 Feb 2007, 16:30
Location: "People's Republik of Kalifornia"

#13 Post by mill0001 »

John,
I'm runnin a AMD64 3400+, with 2 gigs of ram. and a Nvidia geforce 6800 ultra video card, My speeds on DL and UpL are almost twice as fast in Puppy as in my WinXP system which I'm dual booting with Puppy. I'm using Sprint Broadband 3G modem on both systems, ( the same modem). I haven't tweaked anything in Puppy as far as my network is concerned and I have no problem with Youtube or streaming movies from Hulu. The first thing I would suggest to you tho before you do anything else is get rid of 4.2 and DL 4.2.1 version of Puppy. I had a lot of problems on my system with 4.2, it is buggy and 4.2.1. is the bug fix for it. You might find with later drivers etc. in 4.2.1 your speed problem may go away.

panzerpuppy
Posts: 632
Joined: Tue 02 Oct 2007, 07:39

#14 Post by panzerpuppy »

I used to get ~634 kB/s *sustained* D/L speed with Puppy when I had a 6 mbit DSL connection.

That was with a much slower PC than yours (1.8 GHz with 512MB of really slow RAM and a crappy 64MB graphics card)

D/L and U/L speeds were noticeably faster than what I used to get under Windows XP with a *third party* PPPoE driver and tons of registry tweaks.

In Puppy, I just had to tweak the MSS (increasing it from 1412 to 1452) and it ran like a rocket :)

Puppy clamps the MSS to 1412 by default - that's bad for stand-alone PCs with DSL / Cable modems.

DSL users should set the MSS to 1452, while Cable users should use 1460.


To check your REAL download speed, use Pwget and download a very large file from a really fast HTTP server.

Don't use Speedtest.net or Web browsers (especially Opera) to measure your UL/DL speeds. They are extremely inaccurate and unreliable on slow PCs.

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Aitch
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Location: Chatham, Kent, UK

#15 Post by Aitch »

Johnbrush

see here

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=308551

I suspect that it could be a flash/browser problem, rather than network speed, [unless you are using ndiswrapper?]

Also try ttuuxxx's firepup browser, as it's reportedly faster, & good with flash/youtube etc

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=34876

btw ttuuxxx's Puppy214x4 is nice & fast, too - might be worth comparing?

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=42553

Aitch :)

CiaW
Posts: 39
Joined: Tue 23 Jun 2009, 23:39
Location: Spokane, Washington USA
Contact:

Very slow DSL for me too

#16 Post by CiaW »

Hi all, this is my first post to Puppy forums! I'll give a brief background:

A little over a month ago I replaced my Win2k setup with Fedora 7, on an IBM thinkpad 600x laptop. 256mb ram, Pentium III. I also have a 256k DSL connection, using an ethernet / usb adapter setup. And I have a Linksys wireless adapter (using broadcom 4318, discovered that to get it working in F7). I tried installing Ubuntu, had a kernel panic and wouldn't install. Tried to upgrade from F7 to the newest F11, wouldn't work so had to re-install F7 a couple of times... finally used the 'default' which left me with LVM. Someone on the Fedora forums suggested I might want to try Puppy -- and here I am!

I'll leave the wireless discussion for another thread, I did just decompress the firmware using info in another thread, it didn't 'just work' like it did in F7 -- but I'll try a reboot.

Right now I'm connected via eth0 -- and last night I made a puppy save file on a usb external hard drive after booting to the CD, puppy v4.21

Under F7, my download speeds are fine, at least 256k or a small bit higher, it took just about an hour to download the 100mb puppy iso.

But, when I downloaded a .pup for Firefox and also just now downloaded a Seamonkey update of 12mb, it took over 1/2 hour! The speed was showing as between 5 and 6 kb/sec -- so it was basically dial up speed and was about 20 kb/sec slower than it should have been.

What's up with that?? If I can get that figured out, I'll probably install to my local hard drive, but I have to back-up my F7 and get rid of the LVM and re-install or restore my F7 so I can dual-boot. That also means figuring out the grub issue for dual boot, but that's another thread too.

But I have to figure out this connection speed issue first, the rest of it can come later. It's not the browser, since the pup download was just as slllooooww. I'm baffled... I had to use the 'acpi=force' option to get Puppy 4.21 to boot, also. That's a fix I found on the forums. Would that have anything to do with it? I'm not sure what acpi is, even. :roll:

jocoolguy

#17 Post by jocoolguy »

there is a simple thing to accelerate internet connection,last month my internet was too slow and i reach some to rectify,but the person who i reach he asked me to delete temp files in my system i did after i felt little good about my connection after i confirm here by test my speed

purple_ghost
Posts: 416
Joined: Thu 10 Nov 2005, 02:18

Similar sloth with an External Serial Port Modem on Dial up

#18 Post by purple_ghost »

This is not just a broadband problem. I use an External Serial Port Modem with a Dual Quad Core with 4 GB of RAM on dial up. Clearly Vista home downloads faster than Puppy. I tried Puppy-4.4-RT-SMP to engage all the cores, no help. Previously I had a Pentium 4, 1.5 GHz 767 MB RAM. where Windows 98 SE was faster on the Pentium 4 than the versions of Puppy two and three I tried. More strangely an internal (soft) modem ran faster with Windows 98 SE than Windows 98 SE with the External Serial Port Modem. I tried two different External Modems and felt the problem might be the Serial Port was not very fast.

. I suspect it might have something to do with the fact that when a computer starts to download a large file it usually re-sets the size of the chunks it gets, which does not get done so well with either the External Serial Port Modem, or now I must suspect in Linux.

On Dial-Up I was not trying to use the flash player to watch Hulu. Just download ISO's of Linux.
Google Search of Forum: http://wellminded.com/puppy/pupsearch.html

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Aitch
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Joined: Wed 04 Apr 2007, 15:57
Location: Chatham, Kent, UK

#19 Post by Aitch »

try this

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f3/want-speed- ... er-124658/

works with firefox & seamonkey

some say opera is faster, too

me, I'm using ttuuxxx's firepup

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=34876

faster than most without the tweaks - better still with them....

also, for the more adventurous - local dns cache [for *buntu: adjust for puppy]

http://embraceubuntu.com/2006/08/02/loc ... -browsing/

Aitch :)

Shep
Posts: 878
Joined: Sat 08 Nov 2008, 07:55
Location: Australia

#20 Post by Shep »

Does Seamonkey use DNS caching? (Puppy 4.3.1)

I read this post's cite, understand the basic idea, and tried
about:config
to see what Seamonkey's DNS caching is set to, but the string
"DNS" does not occur in seamonkey's configuration.

So, is DNS caching automatic? If so, where is its retention time
set?

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