Posted on Tuesday 29 November 2005 - Popularity: unranked
Apple just released the Broadband Tuner. It allows you to take full advantage of very high-speed Internet connections that have a high latency (5 Mbps or greater), but can be used for slower broadband connections as well. The little installer tweaks some system parameters:
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: 512000This 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.
