SON SON
If your physical infrastructure is in good shape, or you’re using a fast cable broadband service, there’s little else you can do in the way of repairing to improve your broadband connection performance, but ensuring that Windows is set up optimally for good network performance is one way of eking out a bit more speed and reliability, especially on high-speed broadband packages.
Consumer cable broadband provider, recommends using a program called TCP Optimizer to improve performance of its 20Mbits/sec service, but the software can also be used by ADLS customers, TCP Optimizer (www.snipurl.com/a3mdy) is a small utility that edits the TCP and IP parameter in the Windows Registry, the most important tweak it makes is to the TCP Receive Window size.
The TCP Receive Window defines the amount of data a computer can accept from a server without acknowledging the server, if the website has not receive acknowledgement for a packet, it will stop and wait, if it waits to long, it will even re-transmit this data, the standard TCP Receive window is quite small, which means the server stop and waits for acknowledgments more often, TCP Optimizer increases the TCP Receive window value which may speed up larger downloads considerably.
It makes improvements to internet explorer (IE) too, by default, IE will only download two files at a time from a web page, but TCP Optimize will increase that to 10, which has a profound effect on how quick modem website with dozens of graphics and scripts load, TCP Optimize improvements varied from none to very impressive, using speed testing service, TCP Optimize didn’t improve speed or latency, but speed test only measure throughput for a small amount of data, while TCP Optimize is designed to have an effect for bigger download we tried downloading a 166MB files with and without TCP Optimizer’s improvements, when TCP Optimizer was used, downloading a file at around 430Kbytes/sec.
Experienced download speed averaging 121Kbytes/sec without TCP Optimizer and 422Kbytes/sec with TCP Optimizer, thought this must have been a mistake, so restored original registry and performance the speed test again, only to find the speed was indeed 121Kbytes/sec, repeated both reading two more times, but the result stayed the same, TCP Optimize triple HTTP download speed on laptop.
Tried downloading a 200MB file over Bittorent using a torrent file that had over 400 seeds and just 50 peers, which should saturate connection, using two result for an average, speed increased from 695Kbytes/sec to 779Kbytes/sec on one laptop, with no gain on the other two, TCP Optimizer won’t help all PCs, but certain PCs and more specifically, network cards and web applications will benefit enormously.
Using TCP Optimizer on vista PCs and there’s good reason for this, Vista’s TCP/PT stack has had a huge overhaul since XP, which makes same of the TCP Optimizer tweaks redundant, for a start Vista has TCP auto-tuning which mean the TCP Receive window is dynamically adjusted to suit the network conditions, to see what your setting are in Vista, open the command prompt as administrator and type netsh interface tcp show global, you can change the auto-tuning level to normal, by typing netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal, there are several TCP Receive window value available, Microsoft recommenders disable if web browsing and email are sluggish of freeze altogether, some router and network card can’t handle the way Vista resize the TCP Receive window, so disabling it may clear up connectivity problems, highly restricted is the default and allows the TCP Receive window to grow a tiny bit.
Restricted is for limited variable TCP Receive window size, Normal will increased the TCP Receive window to improve the performance of larger downloads and Experimental can accommodate extreme scenarios, but can also slow your speed.