Hi,

On Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 11:04 AM Jerome Shidel <jer...@shidel.net> wrote:
>
> > On Oct 2, 2022, at 5:08 AM, tom ehlert <t...@drivesnapshot.de> wrote:
> > [..]
> > btw dowloading 900  MB .zip over a 4MB/s download link is a PITA; this
> > alone should recommend a split.

(Sorry, I'm horrible at trying to calculate such things, but I try
anyways. Corrections welcome.)

Is this "megabits"? So that would be 30 minutes, right?

4 Mbps = 0.5 MB per second. So 900 MB would be 1800 seconds ...
right?? (Assuming no connection slowdowns.)

> Imagine downloading it back when DOS was the main home user OS — over a fast 
> 56k modem. If you somehow managed to download load it without it erring or 
> timing out, the next OS release would probably be available when you finished.
>
> :-)

56 kbps = 7 kb per second, right? So 37 hours??

Seriously, in cases like that, you'd probably just download overnight
while you're asleep (and nobody is using the phone). Obviously it's
better to only download in pieces so you can verify (with checksum),
and retry (if needed), only a small part instead of the whole thing.

Some places (e.g. Britain) charge for *local* phone calls, right? So
obviously it's more cost effective and easier to just order a physical
CD (assuming you have a working drive) or IOMega ZIP disk or whatever.
(Or somehow copy it from a friend's hard drive who has a faster
connection.)

Compression also helps (obviously) but should be done "solid" so that
it's not only individually per file (and not in very small chunks like
32 kb Deflate). In other words, 7-Zip is overall superior to most
things (in size and speed). (Or maybe RAR.)

This also means avoiding redundant files and too many competing
versions of the same thing. (Smartlinking helps. But modularity and
dynamic libs are a whole other issue.)

Actually, back in the day (1997), if you downloaded Allegro for DJGPP,
they made you compile it yourself, which (on a slow 486) took 30
minutes. That GCC (2.7.2.1) was tons faster than later versions (even
when the latter's optimizations were turned off), don't know why.
Maybe it was the small cpu cache (used better by a smaller binary).

There are many ways to be frugal in size and speed, but most
developers don't have the interest anymore when "everyone" has 64-bit
and gigs of RAM. Software is not cheap to develop. These days,
hardware is much cheaper than software.


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