Apple releases Broadband Tuner 1.0 for high-speed connections
Posted by Dr. Macenstein
Apple has released Broadband Tuner 1.0, a utility that optimizes network settings to help reduce latency in broadband connections.
From the Apple Website
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.
I’ve seen the affects of this on a machine that is improperly configured. The computer literally went from downloading at 30kbps to 200kbps. I goes to show there are a lot of computers out there that aren’t configured or operating in an efficient manner.