Performance

Web Browsing

I spent about an hour doing general web browsing, and trying a couple file downloads from the client machine. During the first hour of testing, I encountered two or three random connection breaks. I wasn't able to track down the cause of the breaks, but they stopped occurring after the first hour.

The lack of speed is noticeable. Websites didn't load as quickly on the client machines as on the server computer with the DSL connection. Both the proxy server and the network speed probably contributed to the latency on the client machine. Nonetheless, websites still loaded fairly quickly -faster than an analog modem at least.

I did run up against the speed limit when I downloaded a set of drivers from Nvidia's website. The 1.5MB zip file only took about four seconds to download on my DSL server machine, but the same file took considerably longer to download on the client machine.

File Transfers

Curious about the slow download, I decided to try transferring a couple files across the powerline network. I started with a 3.4MB mp3 file. The transfer took about three minutes and thirty seconds. That's only about 133kbps! Next, I tried a 5.08MB file. The transfer took five minutes and forty-one seconds for a data rate of 125kbps. Transferring a 21.6MB file took about twenty-four minutes and ten seconds for another 125kbps average transfer rate.

I tried transferring a 49MB file in my final test. In my first attempt, the receiving computer rebooted for no reason right in the middle of the transfer. In the second attempt, the system sending the file rebooted on its own. It was the receiving computer's turn to reboot again in the third attempt. I decided against trying a fourth time.

Gaming

Hopefully, the network would perform better in multiplayer gaming. I was a little discouraged by the average transfer rate, but 125kbps should be fast enough for most multiplayer games. I pinged the client machine from the server and got a 18ms average. I quickly started up a multiplayer game of Quake 2. Pings ranged between 20-30ms which is the same as a normal LAN. I played for a while on both machines, and I didn't notice any lag or other network issues. The PassPort Network performed very well in the gaming tests.

Ping

Q2 Ping