Often wondered this

[Mr Coeur de Lion]

I can download at a max of about 512kb/sec. Not bad.

So why is it when I download my email messages that might be as large as a massive 100kb total, it takes a good 30 secs to a minute? This is on Outlook by the way.

[baypond]

Apparently it is because when you download from outlook you are writing it on to your hard drive, whereas when you look at a website, you are accessing the picture from someone else's server.

 

[Mr Coeur de Lion]

Still would have thought writing 100kb to the hard drive would take that long though. It's nothing really?

[Pickles]

[quote user="LyndaandRichard"]I can download at a max of about 512kb/sec. Not bad.

So why is it when I download my email messages that might be as large as a massive 100kb total, it takes a good 30 secs to a minute? This is on Outlook by the way.

[/quote]

There are several possible reasons:

One is that I think you are actually confusing two different measurement units (I may be teaching you to suck eggs at this point so I apologise in advance).

Telecoms upload and download speeds are usually measured in bits per second - and should technically use a small b.

Filesizes are in Bytes, and should use a capital B. There are 8 bits in a Byte. Therefore your 100KByte message contains 800Kbits (or even more if the KB is actually 1024 rather than 1000 Bytes - this depends on the standard used by the software when reporting).

Next, your "max" 512Kb/s is probably not a sustained maximum: it depends on the line, time of day (how many others are accessing the system etc) and could easily be a lot less than that sometimes.

Then there's the traffic on the mail server.

Then there's the issue with Outlook. I found that from time to time I would have to re-install it to get it to behave itself (export and then reimport the mail folders) - it would sometimes slow down.

There may be other factors - eg if your PC is running something else in the background, doing anti-spam checks, anti-virus checks, etc.

Regards

Pickles

[tel]

Hi,

My 'Guru' told me:

Email downloads are downloaded via a pop or imap server which is usually dealing with yours and x number of emails at the same time, plus your anti-virus is scanning the email as well.

File downloads use mirror sites and use multi-threading which shares the load to increase the download speed. 

If anyone else has another explanation I would be grateful to hear it so I can query it with my guru.

Regards

[Mr Coeur de Lion]

Some good points there. Many thanks for the replies.