The relevance of Internet Access Speed

[sdolezalek]

I have been struggling to make network improvements that allowed me to play DSD512 through a combination of Qobuz/Roon/HqPlayer.  I couldn't quite get there without some dropouts, no matter what I did with my cabling or network equipment.  But then I upgraded my Internet from about 300Gbps to 900Gbps and suddenly no dropouts and my CPU is loafing along at 28% and my GPU at 4-5% doing DSD512 with no dropouts whatsoever.  Z$#B*&???

 

I think that what may be going on is that at the higher speed I can much more rapidly fill my buffers and then allow the computer to do its processing, whereas at slower speed there was too much constant switching between download and processing, but that's just a guess.

 

Anyway, thought I'd post this for others who are trying to get upsampling to work and for whom Internet access speed may be as big an issue as it seems to have been for me. 

 

[Kal Rubinson]

That is puzzling to me.  Your LAN speed may be relevant but, since you are upsampling to DSD512 from PCM (not playing native DSD512), Internet speed should not be relevant and not affect the upsampling process.  

[sdolezalek]

4 hours ago, Kal Rubinson said:

That is puzzling to me.  Your LAN speed may be relevant but, since you are upsampling to DSD512 from PCM (not playing native DSD512), Internet speed should not be relevant and not affect the upsampling process.  

Kal:  That is what I thought, but if I'm pulling a file from Tidal or Qobuz slowly then in theory my computer can only process so much data - which was resulting in an Ethernet usage pattern that looked like this:

 

 

with 50+% CPU load, 67% GPU load and very spiky Ethernet.  By comparison, here is what it now looks like:

 

CPU is now at 46%, GPU is at 1% and Ethernet is almost flat.  Now maybe that is somehow still a LAN problem, but after upgrading to a CISCO Router and managed Cisco SG350 switches, I saw no improvement, then I upgraded my Internet speed and suddenly this. 

[jcbenten]

Do you mean Mbps instead of Gbps?  If you have 900 Gbps I want to move to where you live.

 

300 bps is 75 MBytes/sec...you can download and entire cd in less than 10 seconds.  I am assuming you are using a new modem for the higher speed so there may have been something in the Port control or connection.

 

Also:

Do you have any other internet traffic?

Are you using a VPN?  These can be slow...

Any time of day differences?  For example: my neighborhood is "closed" or limited access (not gated just an older neighborhood that has been surrounded...roads in/out limited...) with only one Broadband feed in and during heavy use times of day, speed can suffer if everyone in the hood is on at the same time.  

[Kal Rubinson]

8 hours ago, sdolezalek said:

Kal:  That is what I thought, but if I'm pulling a file from Tidal or Qobuz slowly then in theory my computer can only process so much data - which was resulting in an Ethernet usage pattern that looked like this:

 

 

with 50+% CPU load, 67% GPU load and very spiky Ethernet.  By comparison, here is what it now looks like:

 

CPU is now at 46%, GPU is at 1% and Ethernet is almost flat.  Now maybe that is somehow still a LAN problem, but after upgrading to a CISCO Router and managed Cisco SG350 switches, I saw no improvement, then I upgraded my Internet speed and suddenly this. 

Your own graphs do not support your contention that Ethernet speed, per se, is making the difference, assuming they represent the same system operations.  At the top, when you are having problems, your Ethernet Receiver rate is seen as 13.4 Mbps.  If you look at the Ethernet Receive rate (in small print) on the bottom picture when everything is running smoothly, it is only 0.1Mbps!

 

As jcbenten points out, there are other possible issues here but Ethernet speed does not appear to be one of them. 

[sdolezalek]

6 hours ago, jcbenten said:

Do you mean Mbps instead of Gbps?  If you have 900 Gbps I want to move to where you live.

 

300 bps is 75 MBytes/sec...you can download and entire cd in less than 10 seconds.  I am assuming you are using a new modem for the higher speed so there may have been something in the Port control or connection.

 

Also:

Do you have any other internet traffic?

Are you using a VPN?  These can be slow...

Any time of day differences?  For example: my neighborhood is "closed" or limited access (not gated just an older neighborhood that has been surrounded...roads in/out limited...) with only one Broadband feed in and during heavy use times of day, speed can suffer if everyone in the hood is on at the same time.  

:-) Oops, yes, of course meant 900 Mbps (too late at night).  What may have been a factor is that to get the higher speed I had to switch to a Docsis 3.1 cable modem instead of the Arris 2482 modem (that I had copied from Chris Connaker's configuration) which was only Docsis 3.0.  In both of my measurements there was no other Internet traffic , I'm not using a VPN, and I have very limited neighborhood interference on bandwidth.  So my guess is that there was something going on with port control that isn't happening in the updated system.  

Thanks for the feedback!