DSL Tweaking

[Martin Stone]

Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Am Mo, den 19.04.2004 schrieb Martin Stone um 18:07:
> 
> 
>>Sorry if I was harsh - but I was referring to your single-word "No." post.  Why 
>>would you post that?  What you write here is much more helpful.  As for my own 
>>experience, like I said, I don't have any personally with Linux/Fedora, but I 
>>know that I was able to get an improvement on a similar OS, and I know that 
>>others have reported that improvements were possible under Linux.  So I gave him 
>>info and pointers that I thought would help him investigate what he wanted to 
>>know, rather than a one-word "shut up" answer.
> 
> 
> It was maybe because I was in a bad mood ;/ In common I am not
> unfriendly. At least I hope so.
> It is that with the keyword "tweaking" all bells go on at me. It comes
> from Windows[tm] area where it seems usual to feel kind of cool/leet if
> being able to change default parameters in the registry, whether that
> really changes anything to better or worse and whether to understand
> what is changed or not.

Very true... especially in the DSL area.  As I recall, back in the dim and 
distant days when DSL first came out, there were a few modems whose firmware 
could be overwritten or fussed with in such a way as to remove the per-user 
limits that were installed by the ISP.  ISPs quickly remedied the problem, but 
the myth of DSL modem tweaking had already taken root.  I was initially 
skeptical that any kind of fooling with tcp/ip driver parameters on the client 
could improve performance - but in my case it actually did.  Just by increasing 
those buffer values and turning off delayed acks, I saw throughput on HTTP 
downloads jump from ~85 KB/s to ~120 KB/s.  What's more, I was able to reproduce 
this on two different DSL links.  So from my experience, there's *something* to 
it, for *some situations* ... The DSL modem firmware tweaking deal, though, is a 
different story - if it doesn't work, which is the most likely case, it's 
useless.  If it does work, which is very unlikely in this day and age, it's 
stealing.

Anyways, cheers, and apologies for our mutual bad moods :-P

Martin