Can my iMac keep up with high speed internet service?

satchmosatchmo
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
A local service provider has just introduced a 5 meg internet service (not sure of the actual speeds).



I'm wondering if there was a limit as to how much my iMac can handle or any bottlenecks that would make it useless to consider this service.

Is there a threshold?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    vandewaalsvandewaals Posts: 450member
    I'd say your internet connection will be the bottleneck by far. 5 Mbits/sec is only about 625 KBytes/sec. You'd need to have something approaching Gigabit speeds to even start coming close, and even then I imagine the bandwidth between different internal components in your iMac is STILL faster.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,423member
    Not really. Your IP stack can handle network traffic in the Megabytes a second. In reality your 5 Megabits per second transfer rate is a piece of cake. The first area you'd probably see slow down is your browser actually being able to render the page but the imac is just sitting there waiting for more data and pumping through what comes across your net connection.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    gsxrboygsxrboy Posts: 565member
    With taking into consideration losses and fudging factor that could still even be done over airport extreme.. so you have a bit of room to play with inside your mac bottleneck wise



    It will be fine ! and fast.. much better than what gets offered in Australia (insert profanities towards telstra)
  • Reply 4 of 6
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    I have (theoretical) 10 Mb/sec download connection via cable here. My 700 Mhz G4 iMac can take all of it without blinking. The broadband connection will be the bottleneck for a long time to come most likely.
  • Reply 5 of 6
    vox barbaravox barbara Posts: 2,021member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by satchmo

    A local service provider has just introduced a 5 meg internet service (not sure of the actual speeds).



    I'm wondering if there was a limit as to how much my iMac can handle or any bottlenecks that would make it useless to consider this service.

    Is there a threshold?



    The html rendering machine of any given browser will be the bottleneck for a long time to come.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    synoticsynotic Posts: 151member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Vox Barbara

    The html rendering machine of any given browser will be the bottleneck for a long time to come.



    Rendering engines are fairly fast and usually take less than a second on most pages. Although there are exceptions, most websites usually aren't complex to truly slow down a rendering engine. The bottleneck is almost always the network connection.



    If you have any websites lying around on your hard drive, you can try seeing how quickly the site loads locally, it should load much more quickly than your current internet. But if it's not, then it's probably not worth it.
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