Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) dial-up throughput speed

I've just enabled ICS on my XP Home (SP2) PC to allow a couple of other
networked computers (Win 98) to have internet connections until I get ADSL
and a router.

I'm interested in the data-transfer speed that the XP (router) PC shows.
Before, when I browsed the web, downloaded email etc, the Networking tab of
Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) for the dial-up connection typically showed a
graph that peaked at nearly 100% of the connection speed (eg 42 kbps) and
averaged about 50%. Now it rarely peaks above 25%.

I presume the Task Manager shows the total throughput to the modem
(including traffic to/from other computers on the network), not just traffic
associated with the browser, email etc on this (router) PC. It must do,
because when the router PC is idle (not browsing) the graph still shows
traffic at times when a remote PC browses.

Woudl you expect that ICS would slow down the total throughput through the
modem? How is the bandwidth divided between the local router PC and remote
PCs connected by network? Is there a fixed partitioning (eg 50% for local PC
and 50% for all remote PCs) or is it dynamic: should any PC be able to get
close to 100% of the bandwidth if it's the only PC that's talking at the
time?

Martin Underwood wrote:

> I've just enabled ICS on my XP Home (SP2) PC to allow a couple of other
> networked computers (Win 98) to have internet connections until I get ADSL
> and a router.
>
> I'm interested in the data-transfer speed that the XP (router) PC shows.
> Before, when I browsed the web, downloaded email etc, the Networking tab of
> Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) for the dial-up connection typically showed a
> graph that peaked at nearly 100% of the connection speed (eg 42 kbps) and
> averaged about 50%. Now it rarely peaks above 25%.
>
> I presume the Task Manager shows the total throughput to the modem
> (including traffic to/from other computers on the network), not just traffic
> associated with the browser, email etc on this (router) PC. It must do,
> because when the router PC is idle (not browsing) the graph still shows
> traffic at times when a remote PC browses.
>
> Woudl you expect that ICS would slow down the total throughput through the
> modem? How is the bandwidth divided between the local router PC and remote
> PCs connected by network? Is there a fixed partitioning (eg 50% for local PC
> and 50% for all remote PCs) or is it dynamic: should any PC be able to get
> close to 100% of the bandwidth if it's the only PC that's talking at the
> time?

What download speeds do you get? with 42000bps, You should be able to
get 4-5KB/sec on any given computer.


--
Ben Cottrell AKA Bench

"Ben Cottrell" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Martin Underwood wrote:
>
>> I've just enabled ICS on my XP Home (SP2) PC to allow a couple of other
>> networked computers (Win 98) to have internet connections until I get
>> ADSL and a router.
>>
>> I'm interested in the data-transfer speed that the XP (router) PC shows.
>> Before, when I browsed the web, downloaded email etc, the Networking tab
>> of Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) for the dial-up connection typically
>> showed a graph that peaked at nearly 100% of the connection speed (eg 42
>> kbps) and averaged about 50%. Now it rarely peaks above 25%.
>
> What download speeds do you get? with 42000bps, You should be able to get
> 4-5KB/sec on any given computer.

Well I'm currently downloading a 7MB file (latest version of SiSoft Sandra)
and it's averaging 3.5 KB/sec. Not sure how much is due to the speed of the
connection and how much is throttled at the ftp site ftp.mirror.ac.uk.

All this will become a bit academic next April when my exchange has ADSL
enabled (I can then turn ICS off and use a proper NAT router solution).
Blimey, next April seems a long way off ;-)

"Martin Underwood" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:41921df5$0$43617$(E-Mail Removed)...
> I've just enabled ICS on my XP Home (SP2) PC to allow a couple of other
> networked computers (Win 98) to have internet connections until I get
> ADSL and a router.
[snip]
> Woudl you expect that ICS would slow down the total throughput through
> the modem?

No, I would not expect it to reduce total throughput, nor can I see how it
would.

> How is the bandwidth divided between the local router PC and remote
> PCs connected by network?

Any one PC should be able to use all available bandwidth, if no others are
using it. When total demand exceeds available bandwidth, you are likely to
find bandwidth divided on a per-connection basis (but that has nothing to do
with ICS).

Alex

Martin Underwood wrote:

>>>I've just enabled ICS on my XP Home (SP2) PC to allow a couple of other
>>>networked computers (Win 98) to have internet connections until I get
>>>ADSL and a router.
>>>
>>>I'm interested in the data-transfer speed that the XP (router) PC shows.
>>>Before, when I browsed the web, downloaded email etc, the Networking tab
>>>of Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) for the dial-up connection typically
>>>showed a graph that peaked at nearly 100% of the connection speed (eg 42
>>>kbps) and averaged about 50%. Now it rarely peaks above 25%.
>>
>>What download speeds do you get? with 42000bps, You should be able to get
>>4-5KB/sec on any given computer.
>
>
> Well I'm currently downloading a 7MB file (latest version of SiSoft Sandra)
> and it's averaging 3.5 KB/sec. Not sure how much is due to the speed of the
> connection and how much is throttled at the ftp site ftp.mirror.ac.uk.

That's not too bad. There's always 100 different factors to take into
account when downloading through a shared dialup connection, I doubt
there would be much you could do to improve it

> All this will become a bit academic next April when my exchange has ADSL
> enabled (I can then turn ICS off and use a proper NAT router solution).
> Blimey, next April seems a long way off ;-)

heh.. I remember waiting for NTL to activate cable internet in my area..
It felt like I'd been waiting years.. oh, Waitasec.. I was!

:-)


--
Ben Cottrell AKA Bench

Martin Underwood wrote:
> I've just enabled ICS on my XP Home (SP2) PC to allow a couple of other
> networked computers (Win 98) to have internet connections until I get ADSL
> and a router.
>
> I'm interested in the data-transfer speed that the XP (router) PC shows.
> Before, when I browsed the web, downloaded email etc, the Networking tab of
> Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) for the dial-up connection typically showed a
> graph that peaked at nearly 100% of the connection speed (eg 42 kbps) and
> averaged about 50%. Now it rarely peaks above 25%.
>

snip


You could try a different internet sharing proxy AnalogX proxy has a
lot of fans and is very simple to set up you can also run Poxomitron on
the pc with the modem and use that as a both sharing and pop up
filtering proxy. Squid will also do the job and act as a really good
caching proxy.

As for download speed most FTP conections are throttled but also the raw
speed of ftp server software varies to an amazing degree.
On my internal network I use an FTP server to hold backups, ayear or so
back I did back to back test of all the popular freeware & shareware
Windows FTP server software the difference in peformance over a 100mbs
lan between the slowest and fastest was amazing. (the AnalogX FTP server
was blindingly quick).

One other thing to note is that with Win modem the signal processing is
done by stealing cycles on CPU of the host PC.