Re: [tlug] The meaning of B in Kb/secs?

["William F. Maton" <wmaton@example.com>]

On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Jean-Christian Imbeault wrote:

> Ok, silly question but I've always been confused when it comes to data
> transfer rates (be in hard drives or ethernet connections) wether the B mean
> bits or bytes?

B = bytes
b = bits

> >From my apache server config-status I get:
>
> 48.9 requests/sec - 413.7 kB/second - 8.5 kB/request
>
> Is that kilobits or kilobytes?

kilobytes, judging from the 'B'.

> The reason I ask is that the pipe to my server at a data center is a
> 100MB/sec pipe (which I assumes means 100 Megabytes/sec) and if my apache
> server is dishing out 413.7 Kilobytes/sec does that mean I am only using

More likely, that's 100Mb/s or fast ethernet.

> 413.7 KB / 100 000 KB = 0.004137
>
> Or 0.413% of my bandwidth?

If it's really kilobytes, then 413.7 * 8 = 3309.6 kilobits, or 3.3 Mb/s.

> If I really am using only 0.417% then I'll think to switching to a 10MB line
> instead.

Might be too thin if that's truly 30% utilization of a 10Mb/s link.  You may
want to re-confirm with your co-lo provider what the link really is (10 or 100
Mb/s).  Link capacities are almost always rated as 'bits'.

Hope this helps.

wfms