I went to a new website for the first time. It took twenty seconds to load. And I have a very fast computer with the latest Big Sur OS and 16GB memory. My Internet speed is 25 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload. The next time I opened that same site, it loaded in 1 second, and that is because that page was cached by the browser from the first time it was accessed.

Clicking on a link within an open page can result in the same long load time.

Each time you open a website, the browser saves a snapshot of the page - called a cache. The cache doesn’t take that much storage space, and it’s part of the browser function to do that (can’t turn it off).

The Internet is often unforgiving. The only thing to improve the speed of the Internet is for all servers to have a fiber link to the Internet backbone, and the servers themselves must be tuned to handle extremely heavy requests. This often means having multiple servers placed around the world all containing the same information and ready to provide data to any request from anywhere in the world. Some companies with websites have one server in one place and no sophisticated means of handling requests.

Hackers found that by pushing millions of requests onto a website in a short period of time, they can cause that website to hang.

Where a fast Internet access comes in handy is when downloading very large files.

A 25GB file downloaded on a 25 Mbps service will take four times longer than the same file downloaded on a 100 Mbps service. Upgrading to Big Sur is about a 16GB file. 1 byte is 8 bits. So a 25 Mbps (mega bits per second) speed is more like 3 Mega bytes per second (MBps). 1 GB (gigabyte) is 1000 MB (megabyte). So a calculated time to download a 16GB file at 25 Mbps is like 88 minutes (16 / .003 / 60). A 100 Mbps service gets in done in 22 minutes. Latency (time for computers to think and time to transfer data) makes it even longer.

I think Apple compresses the original file to something like 4 times smaller and then automatically uncompresses it after it has been received. They call these compressed files ‘packages’ with an extension of either .dmg or .pkg. These are similar to compressed Zip files that have the extension .zip.

John R Carter Sr