Apparent network connection speeds not adding up

[SNGX1275]

I'm just wondering what is going on here, why does firefox and the script I have for mirc confirm I'm dling at about the same speed, but Windows task manager says I'm using 19% of the connection speed.

Sorry abotu the crap quality of the image (had to make it less than 100KB in size), the speed shown in mirc says 5.55kb/sec in case you couldn't read it.

 

[Justin]

What you see in firefox and MIRC (although the darkengine script is not always accurate) is the actual amount of data for that particular file that is being downloaded. So, you are getting "whatever"kb/s of that file.

Windows network monitoring however is total. This includes any other traffic, such as the data transmitted between your IRC client and the server, any pings or other such data being transmitted, as well as the overhead for all the above mentioned. Even that 5.5kb/s swells dramatically when you factor in TCP/IP overhead. You can usually assume 10% overhead for TCP transmissions, much more so if you are experiencing packet loss. At 19% of 48kbp/s, that's a little over 9kbp/s, which is well in line if you factor in all the other traffic.