Thursday, January 11, 2007

Speed DSL

To improve download performance, certain parameters being used by Windows for the TCP/IP protocol can be modified or tweaked. We have done testing here in our office that shows these modfications can reduce download (receiving) time, i.e. increase the speed of the download, by more than 50%. The improvements can be seen the most on systems using the Windows 98 operating system, though even Windows 2000 systems should see a benefit.

Please note that you are not required to "tweak" your system to use DSL. These suggestions are made only to allow you to enhance the performance of your system and it is your decision whether to implement these changes on your system or not.Our tests have shown that with the Windows 2000 system, download speeds averaged around 200Kbps to 300Kbps (25 KBps to 37.5 KBps) without tweaking. After tweaking the TCP/IP settings for Windows 2000, speeds averaged around 450Kbps to 600Kbps (56.25 KBps to 75 KBps).With the Windows 98 system, download speed averaged around 150Kbps to 250Kbps (18.75KBps to 31.25KBps) without tweaking. After tweaking the TCP/IP settings, speeds averaged around 350Kbps to 550Kbps (43.75KBps to 68.75KBps). Here are the "tweaks" that you can try on your system to improve performance.The Received Window (RWIN) size is the most specific parameter that can be changed. For an in-depth explanation on TCP/IP settings for the curious or technically inclined, see the following link.

http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks/RWIN
Our test systems included a Windows 2000 Professional and a Windows 98 machine.To help in checking for any improvements during tweaking, the following site was used for test comparisons.
http://www.dslreports.com/stest
Do speed tests in the morning to eliminate any issues with network congestion and use the Linkline test site since it has fewer hops (number of routers to reach the site) compared to Megapath. The number of hops is one factor that affects the speed of downloads from different sites. The software utility being used for tweaking TCP/IP settings on Windows can be downloaded from this site.
http://www.dslreports.com/front/drtcp.html
Answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) regarding tweaking could be found at this link
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/tweaks

0 comments: