A Penguin in the Orchard

Goose Your Network to Gigabit Ethernet

(Via TidBits.)

I hate waiting for network tasks to complete, whether it’s copying large files, saving a big Word document, or watching a backup take forever. The real problem is that being forced to watch a progress bar often causes me to jump off to another task, which in turn makes me lose track of where I am. I wouldn’t go back to the System 6 days before MultiFinder for anything, but there are times when I think that Mac OS X’s multitasking makes me less productive.

One way to reduce the number of times I hop between tasks is to cut down on the number of unnecessary waits. Last week, I focused on speeding up my Ethernet network’s performance, an effort that proved both easy and inexpensive, and one that I’d encourage anyone who is frustrated by network speeds to try.

(One quick clarification - although we all talk about network “speed,” that’s a misleading term. Increasing the performance of a network is more like increasing the diameter of a water hose. If you’re trying to fill a swimming pool, a fire hose will finish the job much more quickly than a thinner garden hose at the same distance from the water source. That’s what we’re doing when we move from a “slower” network to a “faster” network - we’re making the network pipes bigger, so they can carry more data in the same amount of time. Ideally, we would always talk about increasing network “bandwidth” or “throughput” but those terms don’t always resonate as well with normal users.)

Full post here.