Thread: Theory/Question,

If you're only sending it between 2 locations, I believe you'll only benefit from having 1 socket open (well, two, one for sending data and the other for receiving it).

If you have multiple locations/multiple sources, then you could potentially benefit from having multiple sockets open (again, limited to 1 socket pair per unique location).

An analogy of this would be multi-threading. While many operating systems operate using multi-threading, you don't actually get any performance benefits unless you have a multi-core CPU (granted, there are other benefits to using multi-threading other than pure performance). The same would probably apply to sockets. Unless you're talking to multiple destinations, it makes no sense to open up multiple sockets if the only thing you're looking for is performance. The exception would be if you literally had multiple connections between two locations. In this case, I'm not sure if opening multiple sockets would help still, it'd be something you'd have to experiment with.

Compression will help reduce the amount of data you have to send, but won't speed up how quickly the data is sent. Almost always the network connection speed is considerable slower than a computer's ability to compress/decompress data, making data compression generally a good idea if you're sending a lot of data. That being said, some data doesn't compress well while others compress extremely well, so the benefits of compression is dependent on what data you're actually sending rather than just the amount.

Also, 4 million bytes isn't really that big That's roughly 4 Mb, which with a decent internet connection can be downloaded within a minute or less.

Yes and no. Deep down, your computer probably only has 1 connection to the internet via your ISP. They'll probably have some local router which will limit the speed you can upload/download data from the internet. This is almost always the bottleneck in uploading/downloading from the internet, regardless of how many sockets you try to open (usually it's the upload limit which gets reached first).

Opening multiple sockets essentially has the same effect as running multiple threads/processes on a single core CPU: Each thread/process must share the CPU time, and the more threads/processes you run, the less time each thread/processes gets.

You may be able to squeeze out a little performance boost depending on how you're sending information, but more likely you're network performance will decrease as the overhead for sending data via multiple sockets becomes more and more significant with more sockets.

The one case I can think of where you may get significant speed bonuses is if your server has a software limit on how much network resources to commit to each connection. Opening up multiple sockets with that server may allow you to stream data faster than the software limit, thus giving the appearance that you've "sped up" the network speed. This is analogous to increasing the priority of a certain process. That process will receive a speed bonus, but this is at the expense of other processes receiving a speed drop. Be aware that there is some server software which is written to prevent this effect from happening (particularly on file hosting sites).