Apple releases "Broadband Tuner"

[Civrock]

About Broadband Tuner

The Broadband Tuner allows you to take full advantage of very high speed Internet connections that have a high latency (5 Mbps or greater). The installer tweaks some system parameters.

There is an optional uninstaller that can be used to restore the settings that were in effect at the time just before the system parameters were changed.

What does the Broadband Tuner do exactly?

The installer increases the default values for the size of the TCP send and receive buffers. With larger buffers more data can be in transit at once. A startup configuration file is also updated so that these changes will persist across restarts.

The system parameters are sysctl variables that are set as follows:
net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 131072
net.inet.tcp.recvspace: 358400
kern.ipc.maxsockbuf: 512000

This change has a system wide effect and is applied even if the network is not high speed connection with a high latency, with the exception of modem connections for which the system uses small default TCP buffer sizes.

http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/broadbandtuner10.html


I've been waiting for such a tool by Apple, although it's been possible to optimize these setting with other apps like Cocktail or Tiger Cache Cleaner. Gonna try it out now.

[:MoD:Shade]

Wahhh - must only work for Tiger

[BFG]

Done and done... will be interesting to see what diff it makes if any considering i have already 'tweaked' things

[DarK.]

darn, was hoping this would help me with my recent bandwidth issues here at the college.

Ps, shade is about to post off topic.[/size]

[:MoD:Shade]

Dark you look like a forum noob because you try to screw around with color and size too much - your title should be "Cheap Forum Whore" instead of God Bless the Freaks.

[cO.libre]

owned.

[theweakspot]

daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark helllllllllllllllllllmet

[BFG]

Prawned

[theweakspot]

quick, everyone pile on!

[BFG]

hehehe. WOOMPF!

But to backstep a touch - has anyone noticed any changes? any inprovments? To be honest i couldn't tell the difference but then again i did basically what the lil utilitiy does but manually in the terminal. then again i don't remember if it made a big diff then either.

[:MoD:Shade]

Somebody should have run a speed test before and after you little numpties.

[Civrock]

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/apple_broadband_tuner.html

[:MoD:Shade]

So the moral of the story is . . .

It only works if your on a relatively fast connection, above the speeds of normal Comcast and Verizon providers for us Americans.

[Civrock]

Comcast and Verizon are only the fastest providers in America... but I might've misunderstood your post.

[(SiX)Sheixhundt]

Yeah, I think what he meant was that this utility would be useless for most of us...
(unless i misunderstood Civics stats for what lines this would help)
The Speeds (or latency) of These two providers are not of the type that would be helped by this thing.

"" Apple's "Broadband" Tuner is for High-bandwidth *high-latency* connections. Cable and DSL are *not* high-latency connections. You are likely to see poorer performance from Apple's broadband tuner on Cable and DSL connections versus the default settings.
An example of a high-bandwidth, high-latency connection is satellite.
-Christopher F.""


I Think...?
mb

Really..this points out that considering the technology that the US has at its disposal, its fucking sickening that we get Internet speeds on par with Eastern European countries. (and in many cases...less......wtf'ing fuck?)--its enough to make me want to buffet Ethion gently about the face and nuts with a wiffle ball bat.....

[:MoD:Shade]

Yes Sheix, ty.

But actually I didn't read everything the first time - it seems to be hit or miss, if your lucky you'll see a performance increase, if not then you probably won't see anything.

[Civrock]

Not really. The settings Broadband Tuner changes are RWIN and SWIN, both affects DSL or Cable just as much as other types of high-speed connections. The default values of these settings are 32768 RWIN and SWIN... way too little for pretty much everything above ISDN -> bottleneck for network performance or even speed. Broadband Tuner increases these two important values (and a socket buffer which is less important) significantly... to the values 131072 (SWIN) and 358400 (RWIN, most important). Both these values are way too high for most people and rather impair the quality... although the default settings are bad also. Everybody has to calculate it for himself, Apple just set the new default very high for recent connection speeds, prophylactically. For people who just surf the web etc... it doesn't make a difference. Gamers, though... that's another story.

To find the perfect value for yourself you have to make a tweak test at http://www.broadbandreports.com first. Then you read this: http://www.broadbandreports.com/faq/tweaks/5.%20RWIN and this: http://www.broadbandreports.com/faq/tweaks/10.%20Macintosh. To change the values manually (if you don't know how to do it with the Terminal) you need an app like Cocktail or Tiger Cache Cleaner.

[|MP|Nomad]

This little utility is actually great!! Someone very close to me (Shiex, you know who I'm talking about) told me about it while he was doing some research and I installed it and WOW!! it increased my net performance incredibly!! no joke!

AND!! I game wirelessly.  I went from about 400k UP and DOWN to about anywhere from 700k to 3000k DOWN and about 800k to 1000k UP.

Also, this person told me that it will only show increases (most likely) on Cable or other ISPs offering optical pipeline connections.

Try it out and see, thats what I did and I didn't expect anything great but I was shocked as to how well it increased bandwith performance.