Device rate limits -> wrong measurement?

Development
1

Hi all

I don’t know where to post.

The syncthing’s Device Rate limits are wrong. In the menu it says KiB/s but it’s actually 10 times more. So I limited my sending/incoming rate to 5120 KiB/s. (In the Main Menu it says 5MiB/s, that would be correct 50Megabit/s or ~6MB / s.) But 5120KiB/s in google says 5Mbit/s on one page and 50Mbit/s on another page. https://lmgtfy.com/?q=KiB%2Fs

So this is VERY confusing. please use the same measurement everywhere in the GUI or use Megabit/s oder Megabyte/s. So every programmer and user can relate, noone I know uses MiB/s or KiB/s.

Or at least make it changeable in the options so everyone can use what they are familiar with. thanks

btw. Very Nice tool.

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2

I think I’m confused about what you think is wrong or confusing.

I’m aware of how to use Google. The second link on that result page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-rate_units) might clear things up?

3

First of all, you can click on the units shown in “This Device” to toggle between Bytes per second and Bits per second. (This applies only to that display though, the settings dialog seems fixed to Bytes).

Second, syncthing uses standard ISO/IEC 80000 units. Nothing special about that. Those are units used worldwide. Data rate is sometimes calculated in Bits instead of Bytes, but that is pretty varying from case to case.

5 MiB/s means “5 mebibytes per second” (which is 2^20 * 5 bytes/s). 5 Mb/s on the other hand means “5 megabits per second” (which is 10^6 * 5 bits/s). The capitalization is important here (because 5 MB/s would be “5 megabytes per second”). As this is commonly mixed up by users, syncthing explicitly writes “bps” (for bits per second) when talking about Bits instead of Bytes.

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4

I got thrown off here as well. Incoming Rate Limit (KiB/s) and Outgoing Rate Limit (KiB/s)

Neither are on the wiki mentioned above.

They DO mention kilobyte per second (kB/s ), which is what I think this is referring to. I’m probably splitting hairs here, the small “i” between the KB, I’ve just never seen it written that way.

5

It’s just further down the Wikipedia page in the Conversions table: :wink:

wikipedia
wikipedia842×117 9.38 KB

KiB, MiB and so on have been standard units in computer hardware and software but it’s the retail marketing folks (who wanted nice round numbers) along with SanDisk that started the confusion many years ago.

Long before the following class action lawsuit against SanDisk was dismissed in 2020, SanDisk Memory Card Class Action Dismissed – https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/consumer-products/electronics/sandisk-memory-card-class-action-dismissed/, during the early days of USB flash drives, SanDisk settled a similar lawsuit and agreed to update its product packaging with an asterisk referring to the legal note "1 MB = 1,000,000”.

Later on, various hard drive manufacturers, including both Seagate and Western Digital, got into the same legal trouble – e.g. from October 2007: Seagate lawsuit concludes, settlement announced – https://www.bit-tech.net/news/seagate_lawsuit_concludes_settlement_announced/1/

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7

The funny thing is that they did not do that for their enterprise products, e.g. I had 36GB SCSI and 600GB SAS HDDs and they actually showed like that in Windows (instead of the usual 40 GB drive “shrinking” to 36GB, etc.).

On a side note, Microsoft uses KB/MB/GB, but they actually mean KiB/MiB/GiB and calculate file sizes using the binary system. On the other hand, Apple, at least nowadays, calculates using the decimal system. Linux varies depending on the window manager, etc.

8

There’s also the historical difference in convention between storage gear (binary bytes) and networking gear (SI bits). :person_shrugging:

9

So true. When an enterprise customer pays 4x more per byte, it likely makes it tougher to explain away a 10% shrinkage. :grinning: