Hello everyone, I was wondering how much communication bandwidth is used when I im downloading a file. Lets say im downloading a file at 1 MB/s over a web server , how much bandwidth is loss in as information that the packet been sent to a client. Im no computer experts just wanted to know if bandwidth is loss as communication data .

Yes, there is overhead. You have TCP and other headers involved that make the effective throughput less. It's a very small percentage, but it exists.

Chris

TCP overhead scales depending on how far the client is from the server (as in latency) and other settings like your MTU.

If each packet has to be rather small becuse of your RWIN then it is less efficient, but still quite reasonable.

On each IP packet there should he a 20byte header, same goes for the TCP packet inside, an other 20bytes.

If theres IPSec and other stuff going on it's a little larger sometimes.

It majorly depends upon latency
if you latency is below 300ms....then it is a very small percentage...not even significant enough...

Thanks for your replies guys, that was instructive .