Might be time for an upgrade
We frequently do business with a firm that prepares reports for us, stuff like environmental impact studies, etc. that they in turn make available to us for download from their website. Since the clients want us to send them a CD copy of the report, and since most of our users don’t have CD burners, we get the unique pleasure of grabbing these reports and burning them to CD.
Doesn’t sound like a big deal, right? Only, it usually is. You see this firm, I’m guessing, uses this approach to all their work, and must have a whole lot of people trying to access their various reports at the same time. At least that’s the only explanation I have for the ridiculously slow download speeds. The other day, I needed to grab a 9MB PDF from their site. It took me all afternoon. The first three attempts timed out at some point in the download. The 4th attempt completed in about 2 1/2 hours. Yes, I was getting a whopping 1.2 Kb/sec download speed. (That was the average, I actually saw it go as low as 897 bytes/sec. at one point.)
I’m not trying to tell anyone how to do business, and I’m certainly not trying to come off like more of a network guru than I am, but it seems like having some more pipe to your webserver, and maybe even some more processing power on that server, would save your customers some headaches, wouldn’t it?
