The steps involved in connecting to the Internet and then to the web are very detailed even if it does seem to be smooth from the user end.
So what happens for real when you just want to connect to a website? Assuming you are already connected to the internet, here are the eight steps that occur in order:
1. You open your browser.
2. You type in the URL (website name).
3. Website name saved in History Cache on the hard disk.
4. Your computer looks up the name of the address to your default DNS server to find the IP address.
5. Your computer connects to the server at the IP address provided at the default web port of 80 TCP if you used “HTTP://” or 443 TCP if you used “HTTPS://” at the front of the web server name (by the way, if you used HTTPS then there are other steps involved using server certificates which we will not follow in this example).
6. Your computer requests the page or directory you specified with the default often being “index.htm” if you don't specify anything. But the server decides t's default and not your browser.
7. The pages are stored in a cache on your harddisk. Even if you tell it to store the information in memory (RAM), there is a good chance it will end up somewhere on your disk either in a PAGEFILE or in a SWAPFILE.
8. The browser nearly instantaneously shows you what it has stored. Again, there is a difference between “perceived speed” and “actual speed” of your web surfing which is actually the difference between how fast something is downloaded (actual) and how fast your browser and graphics card can render the page and graphics and show them to you (perceived). Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it didn't end up in your browser cache.
So what happens for real when you just want to connect to a website? Assuming you are already connected to the internet, here are the eight steps that occur in order:
1. You open your browser.
2. You type in the URL (website name).
3. Website name saved in History Cache on the hard disk.
4. Your computer looks up the name of the address to your default DNS server to find the IP address.
5. Your computer connects to the server at the IP address provided at the default web port of 80 TCP if you used “HTTP://” or 443 TCP if you used “HTTPS://” at the front of the web server name (by the way, if you used HTTPS then there are other steps involved using server certificates which we will not follow in this example).
6. Your computer requests the page or directory you specified with the default often being “index.htm” if you don't specify anything. But the server decides t's default and not your browser.
7. The pages are stored in a cache on your harddisk. Even if you tell it to store the information in memory (RAM), there is a good chance it will end up somewhere on your disk either in a PAGEFILE or in a SWAPFILE.
8. The browser nearly instantaneously shows you what it has stored. Again, there is a difference between “perceived speed” and “actual speed” of your web surfing which is actually the difference between how fast something is downloaded (actual) and how fast your browser and graphics card can render the page and graphics and show them to you (perceived). Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it didn't end up in your browser cache.
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