Assume the Internet speed is 10 MBps, NIC is GigabitEthernet, PCI bus connecting to RAM is 133 MBps, disk IO is 70 MBps, and this server simply accepts files and stores them to disk and then returns when requested.
Am I correct to understand that a 1000 MB file will take 100 seconds to upload and download from the server since the slowest piece is the 10 MBps internet link?
The slowest link in a path will dictate the transfer speed, but a raw bitrate is only one part of it. You also need to consider the packet size and protocol overhead. The smaller the packets, the more packets are transferred, the more protocol overhead eats up bandwidth.
In addition to Ron mentioned, it also depends on upstream/downstream bandwidth of the Server where you are trying dowload from or upload to..
Note: Common BW notation would be Mbps.
This might be classed as slightly off topic, but you might be interested in reading about Long Fat Networks (LFNs). The reason why I say this is because a big internet pipe does not always mean it will be fast, nor will it be fully utilised unless it is set tuned correctly.
