Went from 116kps to 1.8 mps with TCPOptimzer???

I checked my bandwidth on Bandwidthplace.com, and it was at 116kps. There was a link to a site where I DL'd a program called TCPOptimzer, after installing this 400k program, now I am DLing at 1.8??? That drastic of a change with a program?

I forget... Are you on a Cable Modem or DSL?

There are tweaks to the registry that can be done to enhance your speed. Typical Win 95/98 was never setup with networking in mind, so they are optimized for a dialup modem with latency in mind.

Whereas on a CM/DSL the latency is a lot smaller and your connection can benefit by a few tweaks. WinNT/XP should already be optimized good out of the box.

Re: Went from 116kps to 1.8 mps with TCPOptimzer??

To put it very, very simply...you cannot download faster than you are limited by your ISP. I'm sure James S can back me up on this as he seems to be quite the intelligent fellow. Just for kicks, I downloaded that program you mentioned and put it on a Win2k box I have at home. All tests I ran both with and without it enabled yielded the same results as I suspected. It's kind of like being on a dialup and going from ~56kbps to 1mbps. It's just not feasable.

Now, I know some cable companies limit bandwidth on the client-end at the cable modem. Those types of limits can be cracked. But, if they're limiting the bandwidth on their end, you can't go any faster than they're going to allow you.

- G!mpy

Re: Went from 116kps to 1.8 mps with TCPOptimzer??

If you screw up the duplex setting on a 100baseT network, you can easily destroy your bandwidth. Everything still works, just at something between 1/1000th and 1/20th the speed. I don't know that this is what that software does, but that would do it.

If you're running a newer operating systems - Windows NT4, 2000, or XT, there really aren't any settings to tweak, other than making sure the network card is setup properly. Older OS's - 95, 98, Me, may benifit from tweaking.

Re: Went from 116kps to 1.8 mps with TCPOptimzer??

I am running ME, that could by why I saw such a good benefit. I don't know how it works but I like it!

Re: Went from 116kps to 1.8 mps with TCPOptimzer??

If you want a second opinion, try here: http://www.dslreports.com/stest
Its another free test site.
Maybe the last one looks for that program installed?
Probably not, your link scored me very close to my above link.

That seems like a large jump.
It would be interesting to know why.

Re: Went from 116kps to 1.8 mps with TCPOptimzer??

Actually, I was looking around dslreports and they have a treak section. It analyzes your system and tells you what to do for possibly better connections.
http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks
It would be interesting to see what changed between your speed test runs.

Re: Went from 116kps to 1.8 mps with TCPOptimzer??

Seems intuitive (and that's all I can go on from here because I don't know the TCP/IP tweakability of WinXX) that if you're on a 10/100 Ethernet line to, say, a cable modem or DSL line your throughput could be jumped a huge amount just by increasing the default packet size. I mean, the original/default datagram size might have been set by Microsoft to be teeny in WinXX under the assumption that you'd be sending it over PPP or an old Ethernet Thicknet with vampire taps and high loss rates. Being teeny would mean that not so much would need to be re-sent each time a datagram was lost in the Ether or over a crappy phoneline. If you now introduce modern equipment like a 10/100 switch, nice short Cat5e cables that are by no means pushed to their limits, connected to a modern cable modem or dsl, etc, then your loss rate is probably now nearly nil compared to what the stack was originally designed for.

Enlarging the size of the datagram could have a hugely beneficial effect under that scenario, eh? And couldn't an "optimizer" do something like that under Windows?

Re: Went from 116kps to 1.8 mps with TCPOptimzer??

Gimpy00Wang, I hope you're not calling me an intelligent fellow /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif But I'll back you up.

You can't increase the speed of your connection. But it MAY be doing things to change how you're using it. Packet size is one thing that can be adjusted, but I don't think that can affect incoming data, which may be in any size, but rather outgoing when you're making your own packets. I can't back that up, but it's my suspicion.

The other thing I've seen done is similar to what those 2 way satelight links do. There is a lot of error checking in TCP, thats how it works as a "guaranteed" relayer of data. Basically when I open a connection I'm promised by the system to either get the data, or get an error, but I'll never have bits missing or screwed up data. This means sending a lot of info back and forth, it's not just a stream of data, but acks and replies and such need to go back and forth. So you can only download as fast as you can send acks for the packets back to the server. Since the latency is SO bad on satelight systems they basically turn this off and just pump data down as fast as they can and rely on your computer to keep up. This works pretty good for web browsing but for other things it can definitely increase errors and make corrupt data.

They could be doing something like that. Actually MS does this kind of thing all the time. It's built into IE and IIS, if they are talking to each other IIS doesn't wait for the ack packets and just dumps the data at you. This is why some sites load almost instantly in IE and others seem to take a long time to start downloading. Cause IE has to realize that the first request didn't work and then do it over properly.

But, in order to make any difference that requires that both sides of the conversation are aware of the broken protocol. It won't make a difference to a regular connection between regular machines.

So the bottom line is that i've written this entire email without a clue as to what is happening or why it seems like you're getting faster data.

Bigger packets mean fewer acks need to go back and forth, so it can increase the perceived throughput, but not by nearly that much. And it would create slower connections for anything else that was happening over the network as it wouldn't share as nicely with other connections.

So run those tests over at dslreport.com and let us know what happens!

Re: Went from 116kps to 1.8 mps with TCPOptimzer??

I ran it over at DSLreports earlier today and it was around the same. I tried to run it again a few seconds ago, and It said I was over the limit.

I guess I will add this question to this post as well. Anyone know why I would not be getting video on quicktime movies?

Re: Went from 116kps to 1.8 mps with TCPOptimzer??

Try the bandwidth meter at www.2wire.com
That's pretty nice. Just told me I'm getting 2893Kbps, so maybe it's not so accurate. Or maybe I'm tunneling through a worm-hole in the Ethernet continuum. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif

No seriously, doesn't TCP/IP do a packet-size negotiation on TCP and UDP and also TCP does a window-sizing negotiation? I can't remember that stuff very well, but it may result in better throughput in both directions if that's the case.

Re: Went from 116kps to 1.8 mps with TCPOptimzer??

Are you not getting vide on ANY quicktime movies or just some of them? There are a bunch of avi codecs that QuickTime doesn't support. Every so often I find a movie that will play the audio and not the video or the other way way around.

If it won't play any at all then something else is messed up and you should just re-install it.

QuickTime is the absolute best cross platform API for doing AV stuff. The commands really are identical making it really easy to port stuff back and forth between the Mac and Windows. They even have encapsulated a lot of networking stuff in there for streaming and whatnot, which means that I can write an app that sends files back and forth that will compile for the Mac and Windows with almost no other changes in code. Now thats pretty interesting stuff.

Re: Went from 116kps to 1.8 mps with TCPOptimzer??

I am not getting any Quicktime movies, Windows media player, and Real work though. None of the movie trailors apple.com has work. Any ideas why? I downloaded their most recent version too.

-Peter