The next broadband killer: advanced operating systems?

Sam Stickland sam_mailinglists at spacething.org
Mon Oct 22 16:00:09 UTC 2007


Interesting. I imainge this could have a large impact to the typical 
enterprise, where they might do large scale upgrades in a short period 
of time.

Does anyone know if there are any plans by Microsoft to push this out as 
a Windows XP update as well?

S

Leo Bicknell wrote:
> Windows Vista, and next week Mac OS X Leopard introduced a significant
> improvement to the TCP stack, Window Auto-Tuning.  FreeBSD is
> committing TCP Socket Buffer Auto-Sizing in FreeBSD 7.  I've also
> been told similar features are in the 2.6 Kernel used by several
> popular Linux distributions.
>
> Today a large number of consumer / web server combinations are limited
> to a 32k window size, which on a 60ms link across the country limits
> the speed of a single TCP connection to 533kbytes/sec, or 4.2Mbits/sec.
> Users with 6 and 8 MBps broadband connections can't even fill their
> pipe on a software download.
>
> With these improvements in both clients and servers soon these
> systems may auto-tune to fill 100Mbps (or larger) pipes.  Related
> to our current discussion of bittorrent clients as much as they are
> "unfair" by trying to use the entire pipe, will these auto-tuning
> improvements create the same situation?
>
>   




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