Bad management of bandwidth

[slags]

Hi all,

On OS X I find that while I download a file it absolutely saturates my Internet connection, to the point where browsing becomes impossible because even the simplest of pages take minutes to load. On other platforms this isn't such a problem (a Windows XP install on the same machine knows that it shouldn't give all of the bandwidth to that one socket, meaning that I can still browse at a reasonable speed to the slightly detriment of the download speed).

Has anybody else experienced this? Is there a setting to help me tweak this? I can't find anything in the system control panel. I'm fed up with dreading downloads.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

I have never experienced this -- if I'm downloading a huge file, it will saturate my bandwidth... if I do something else network-intensive like browsing, then they will share the bandwidth equally (albeit with slightly increased latency).

Are you using some kind of download manager or something? Could this be a problem with your router (maybe doing some QoS mangling), and not Mac OS X?

 

[slags]

No download managers. It seems to be a system-level problem, as it happens for any kind of network access. One flat-out transfer will throttle the connection beyond reason.

I was experiencing this from the day I got my Mac (almost a year ago!) before I installed any software at all.

It's not a router problem, unless it's a specific incompatibility between OS X and the router. Like I say, the exact same machine booted into Windows doesn't have the same problem, and that's even using the same network adapter.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Strange, indeed. Definitely not a normal thing to happen, all things considered.

What model/make of Mac?
What version of OS X?
In what browser(s) or program(s) does this happen?
Does it do the same thing with local network traffic (i.e., a home network, transferring files between computers) as well as external (internet) traffic?
How are you connected to the network -- airport, ethernet, or both?

 

[slags]

Thanks for mentioning QoS, that seems to be the key word. That's what the problem is; my router doesn't have any QoS at all, and OS X doesn't provide the same QoS/packet scheduling/whatever layer that XP does. That's fine, as long as I know what the problem is I can work on it. Annoyingly my ISP locks me into this terrible router (they don't provide user name or password) so upgrading is going to be difficult!