Is 1000Mb/s better than 100Mb/s?

Hello,
How 1000Mb/s uplink connection is better than 100Mb/s?
Does it increase in page load speed in anyway?
I have a forum which gets about 6000 visitors per day and we offer downloads of legit attachments. So, if we upgrade to 1000Mb/s, will it help on getting faster download speed and faster pageloads?

What are the downsides?

Thanks
DT

 

It's theoretically 10 times as fast, but whether it will make a difference is determined by more factors than just the network speed. Can the server respond any more quickly? Is the CPU or RAM maxed out? Have you reached max disk I/O. There is usually some sort of bottleneck in a system that stops the server/site making full use of all the resources available, and you need to determine what these bottlenecks might be.

If your site is performing well, network utilisation is low, and everything else has room for more performance, then it's unlikely to make much difference. If your network connection is maxed out, but other resources are hardly being used then it will make a difference.

When you have a couple of serves linked together and sharing data, fast networks are usually better, but when it comes to the front-end internet-facing connection, you may not gain much from a faster connection unless your network connection is maxed out, and if you're maxing out a 100mbps connection, your host will be "discussing" it with you - guaranteed!!! as it's equal to 32,6000GB per month.

The only other time it might make a difference is if the 100mbps port is on a Fast Ethernet (100mbps) switch. In this case the determining factor is not YOUR 100mbps connection but the collective upstream connection. If that is nearing capacity then upgrading to a gigabit switch with 1000Mbps connections MAY help - but from the limited info you have it's impossible to tell.

 

Just out of interest is this about connection speed or data transfer allowance?

 

It's about connection speed.

@Ron,
Thanks for your clarifications.
My server load always remains under 0.5 yet having a slowness. It takes about 20 secs on a 2Mb/s internet connection. There's absolutely no heavy graphics or anything.

 

The first thing I would check would be my ISP. ISP traffic is always contended so even if you're connecting at 2Mbps you'll be sharing that with up up to 20 other users at peak times. If other sites seem to be OK, and you're sure it isn't your ISP, then something doesn't sound right.

Carry out a few Traceroutes over the course of 2-3 days and keep the results. This might indicate slow routers on your connection, too many hops, packet loss, or some other internet problem, and it may give some indication about where the problem lies.

Check your site and server logs for anything unusual or for pointers about processes that might be going wrong. Is you site waiting on information from a database which is causing the delay? Is it looking for pages that don't exist which causes the delay?

Your sever doesn't seem to be stressed out so there is something else slowing it down. You just need to try to find out where it is - in the site, on the server, with internal networks, external networks, your hosts network, the internet, or your ISP. It could be anywhere so testing various parts of the process is the only way to start narrowing it down.

When sites perform slowly the first place I'd always look after carrying out a tracert is the programme itself. Look for loops, missing includes, complicated DB queries that could be optimized or shortened, carry out some speed tests on DB response times. Just go through it step-by-step and you'll find the issue.

In answer to your initial question, upgrading the network would not be the best thing at this time as my guess is that there is something else wrong. Ultimately a network upgrade may be the way to go, but not right now

 

My website is hosted on ThePlanet network and when I run the following test I see my website (tirip.com) is always taking a longer time to load compared to other
websites on ThePlanet dedicated servers:
http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test?domain=tabnak.ir niksalehi.com bia2.com tirip.com

I talked to some technicians from ThePlanet and they suggested since I'm using 30% of my network I should upgrade to 1000GB.

Any thoughts?

 

What you need to look at is your current bandwidth graphs. Are they approaching the 100Mb limit or not? If you are just using 30% of the 100Mb limit, it really does not make sense to upgrade to a 1G Port.

EDIT: By bandwidth graphs, I mean the data transfer speed graphs.

 

The "bottleneck" is your own/users internet connection at home/company. And the routing from your server to the end user watching the site.

1000MBit is useless if your 100MBit connection of the server not maxed out at least 40-50% of the day IMHO.
We have serveral servers on 100MBit and about 10.000 pageviews/day.

We never had problems with traffic peaks.

 

I have found that upgrading to GigE often results in performance improvements if you are at 50% or more capacity of your 100Mbit. Part of this is due to some features that are enabled in switches with GigE that are not permitted with 100Mbit. On some sites, I've seen trivial improvements by switching to GigE.

In most cases, you will find far better improvements by focusing on end-user experience using tools like Yahoo!'s YSlow. Tuning with this tool, using caching and compression correctly can really make a huge difference is site performance.

 

currently i maintain a forum with 3k-5k visitor daily and around 1.3m-2m hits with only 1mbps uplink, it's still fast and not considering to use higher uplink yet