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Re: The next broadband killer: advanced operating systems?

  • From: Sam Stickland
  • Date: Tue Oct 23 04:48:54 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