The next broadband killer: advanced operating systems?

Sam Stickland sam_mailinglists at spacething.org
Tue Oct 23 08:33:16 UTC 2007


Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
>
> On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Sam Stickland wrote:
>
>> Does anyone know if there are any plans by Microsoft to push this out 
>> as a Windows XP update as well?
>
> You can achieve the same thing by running a utility such as TCP 
> Optimizer.
>
> http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php
>
> Turn on window scaling and increase the TCP window size to 1 meg or 
> so, and you should be good to go.
>
> The "only" thing this changes for ISPs is that all of a sudden 
> increasing the latency by 30-50ms by buffering in a router that has a 
> link that is full, won't help much, end user machines will be able to 
> cope with that and still use the bw. So if you want to make the gamers 
> happy you might want to look into that WRED drop profile one more time 
> with this in mind if you're in the habit of congesting your core 
> regularily.
>
I've already hand adjusted the default TCP window size on my machine and 
it noticably made quite a big difference my transfer rates from my own 
tuned servers. From this little bit of evidence I can blazenly 
extrpolate to suggest that maximum bandwidth consumption is currently 
limited to some noticable degree by the lack of widely deployed TCP 
window size tuning. Links that are currently uncongested might suddenly 
see a sizable amount of extra traffic.

I'm concerned that if Microsoft were to post this as a patch to Windows 
XP/2003 then we would see the effects of this "all at once", instead of 
the gradual process of Vista deployment. Anyone agree?

Sam



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