How does Plipbox compare to a zorro ethernet board? Alot slower? or comparable?
This is tough subject. I'll try to keep it simple. All b values are in bytes.
Absolute theoretical maximum speed of the parallel port is 716kb per second on the Amiga. BUT, to do that, you have to shut down the whole operating system and just use the processor to monitor the port. And the port can only send or receive, it can't do both at the same time.
https://lallafa.de/blog/2015/09/amiga-parallel-port-how-fast-can-you-go/Plipbox claims about 96KB per second max, but remember, only one way traffic. About 40kb a second is more realistic.
A zorrro 2 card has a theoretical maximum theoretical limit of 3.5 mbs transfer. You typically get less than 3. But a network speed of 10 megabits per second max is doable (about 1Mb per second in bytes). Not doable at all with a plipbox.
What you actually get depends how fast all the different software components are running. Bearing in mind that the processor is driving the os, the hardware transfers, the tcp-ip stack to cut it all up into packets, and the web browser, which includes things like ssl encryption.
It may well be possible to tweak the multitasking a little and set the priority of processes to get more CPU time. But it''s only going to work as fast as the slowest component can manage.
EDIT: Boils down to spoonfeeding a fast processor (040 up) from the parallel port. Web browsing max gets throttled. On a slower processor it doesn't really matter because they can't render the received data fast enough to make a difference really.
Like I said, simple version.
