DSL Tweaking

[Martin Stone]

Wow, there's a candidate for the Most Pointless Response Award...

Actually, there are some values that people often tweak in hopes of getting 
better broadband performance, sometimes with pretty decent results.  Since I 
don't run Linux at home, I don't know specifics for Linux and broadband, but I 
do know that I was able to get an improvement in throughput on Mac OS X by 
setting the following sysctl values:

net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 65536
net.inet.tcp.recvspace: 65536
net.inet.udp.recvspace: 73728
net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack: 0

There may be something analogous that you can do in Linux.  The idea behind the 
sendspace/recvspace lines is to increase the size of some TCP/IP fragmentation 
buffers so that you can send and receive more packets at a time.  The 
delayed_ack flag turns off a waiting behavior of TCP with regard to 
acknowledgement packets.

Your mileage may vary, etc., but there's no harm in fooling around with sysctl 
and /proc/sys/net to see if you can get some better throughput.  Also, check out 
ip-sysctl.txt in the /usr/src/linux*/Documentation/networking directory for some 
rather sketchy documentation on what all those values do.


Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Am So, den 18.04.2004 schrieb edwarner99 at yahoo.com um 14:24:
> 
> 
>>I know that Linux if pretty efficient at optimizing
>>DSL connections and speed, but was wondering if there
>>are any "tweaks" to be aware of to speed up downloads?
>>Thanks,
> 
> 
> No.
> 
> Alexander
> 
> 
>