[ OT? ]: Firefox hogging nwk bandwidth

[Gilboa Davara]

On Sat, 2006-11-04 at 12:13 +0530, Anoop Chandran wrote:
> Hey guys,
> 
> I was running an ssh session to a remote box from my laptop (FC6).
> Meanwhile, 
> I started a download of a tar ball using Firefox (v.2). And suddenly I
> was
> unable to send any inputs to the terminal. It was like Firefox was
> hogging 
> all of the network bandwidth. I waited till the download to be
> completed, to 
> send further commands, so that i could really see what I was typing to
> the
> terminal. 
> 
> Amused, I tried second time downloading a different package using
> Firefox. 
> Same thing happened. I tried a `ping www.yahoo.com` and it took at
> least
> five seconds to resolve the host and start pinging the host.
> 
> Was wondering if anyone had faced similar situation.
> 
> - Anoop

Short answer:
By design, unless you are using bandwidth capping (either on the
application or on the OS side), the network layer will give your
application all the bandwidth the network hardware has to offer.
If you are on a 200kbps line, and both the server and the intermediate
connections all have 200kbps to give you, the file download will eat
200kbps.

- Gilboa