Wednesday, October 23, 2013

OS X Release Slows Internet

My Internet connection has been draggy today, running about a tenth of its nominal speed. This is surely the result of network users in my neighborhood downloading OS X 10.9 Mavericks. The Mavericks release affects fewer users than the iOS release last month, but it is a larger download, so the total network traffic is probably higher. On the other hand, it takes a more concentrated effort to upgrade a desktop computer, so the downloads may be spread out over a couple of weeks. There aren’t many reports of choke points on the Internet since yesterday’s Mavericks release, so perhaps that shows that the pace of downloads is slower, but it is still large enough to test the Internet’s capacity at specific times and places.