It's official, I've got a silicon relative of Cerberus under my desk.
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| Performance Report From Our WiFi Access Point |
With various system & application installs I've been doing this week, I've copying big payloads between systems and downloading packages from Internet.
The most noticeable thing was that downloading a 4.7 GB file from archive.org took a leisurely 30 minutes. Both our internal links and my FiOS Internet are better than that, so it was probably on their end. But it points up that we have gotten rather used to end-to-end 1 Gb/s performance.
The impressive thing is not actually the network speed, it's that internally we've had this basic infrastructure for 16 years. When we moved to Kenmore 2007 and discovered using WiFi didn't cut it, we installed a Gigabit/second unmanaged Ethernet main switch in the network pantry and ran 16 ports to it. Since then we have run additional six ports, added four small switches in various rooms, upgraded the Wi-Fi access points, and did multiple upgrades of our Internet service. However, we have never upgraded the speed of the main switch, and the wires running from the network pantry to our desktops are the same ones we installed originally.
(And even our oldest computers, my early 2008 Mac Pro & our 2012 MacBook Air, have Gigabit Ethernet ports. A few $35 Raspberry Pi units don't. Ah, well.)
No doubt our infrastructure has slid from bleeding edge to merely slightly above average, but I'm still happy with it.
I guess I've been doing it right.
P. S. In the there is always a faster gun nearby department, I should point out I know we do not have the best network on the Northshore of Lake Washington. That would go to a former coworker one town over who has 10 GB/second Ethernet and VLANs in his house. To each their own …
