I (Electrical + Software Engineer) once worked for a physicist who believed that anything less than an order of magnitude was merely an engineering problem. He was usually correct.
I was taught the same. To not care a lot about things under an order of magnitude. Over the years when planning large software projects or assessing incidents and so on, the 1 order of magnitude threshold helped me often.
As a physicist, I think this is correct too :). You don't start to see problems with things under that, unless they are deviation from standard model predictions.
Not as far off as the casual reader might think 20MB vs 1Gb sounds way more than the actuall 160Mb vs 1Gb - one shouldn't use Bytes and bits in a direct comparison together. One or the other, otherwise it's misleading/confusing.
In this case transferring the data at the slow rate would have taken more than a week, so it's no small difference. Actually one side had a 10 Gbps line, so if the other side had had faster networking I could easily have exceeded the limit and gotten the transfer done more than 6x faster.
I used the term "1 Gbps line" just because it's a well known quantity - the limitation of Gigabit Ethernet. The point wasn't that multiplexing TCP can get you 6x better speeds, it's that it improved the speed so much that the TCP bandwidth-delay product was no longer the limiting factor in the transfer.
Yeah but with magic wormholes you see, there could be other universes where that's not the case and 160mbps is close to 1024mbps or 1000mbps whatever the cool kids call a gigabit now adays.
