North American Network Operators Group
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Re: The next broadband killer: advanced operating systems?

  • From: Sam Stickland
  • Date: Mon Oct 22 12:23:43 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?