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When using chrome dev tools, the network throttling functionality seems to simulate a slower connection than the kb/s down setting defines.

For example when simulating with the preset of 50kb/s for GPRS and downloading a 256kb file, chrome shows the file taking a total of 42.89 sec for the content download. Yet, 256 / 50 would come to 5.12 seconds. Am I missing something here?

Thanks for reading, -cybo

cyboman
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Internet connection speeds are measured in kilobits instead of kilobytes to describe the connection speed. That explains the 8x difference between the value you got and what you expected.

Here's another example, downloading the 181 kilobyte StackOverflow sprites file.

50kb/s is 6.25KB/s. We'd expect the download to take 181KB / (6.25KB/s) = 28.96s, which closely matches the actual value of 28.83s.

Throttled network connection timing

Garbee
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Matt Zeunert
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  • It's actually kibibits, not kilobits. You can tell by the automatic unit conversion from kb/s to Mb/s in the chrome developer tools: it changes 1024kb/s to 1.0Mb/s, which only makes sense if the units are kibibits and mebibits. – ldanilek Aug 31 '18 at 19:07