Broadband Tuner 1.0 from Apple

D

Durbrow

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Has anyone tried this? Any bugs? Any improvements? I am particularly interested if anyone has tried it with Comcast in N. California. Here is the description from the apple site.

About Broadband Tuner
The Broadband Tuner allows you to take full advantage of very high speed Internet connections that have a high latency. 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.
 
Comments about this from MacFixIt readers;

My testing on various websites that test broadband downloads & uploads show
that BroadbandOptimizer-1.5 yielded better overall results than Apple's
software, YMMV.
[ Reply to This ]

Apple releases Broadband Tuner 1.0
Authored by: gaiserrc on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 06:07 PM PST
It doesn't seem to work well with Charter in Bham, Al. Before my bandwidth was
around 1.3mb down and after around 550 kps and then uninstall and it goes
back up. Pinged several web sites brfore and after install and the average stayed
the same. BTW We just had a bad day of thunderstorms and gusty wind. I say
this cause my DL is usually over 2.5 mb so maybe its a temporay problem.
[ Reply to This ]

Deathscreen with Broadband Tuner 1.0
Authored by: bombarde on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 06:58 PM PST
On a 2.0GHz dual G5 running latest Tiger updates, a restart brought up the
deathscreen. The only way to get the machine running again was to unplug/
replug the AC power cord. Fixing permissions, uninstalling and then reinstalling
the tuner, and then fixing permissions again seems to have it running okay.

I've got a connection that easily does 5 Mbps down on a PC, but the Mac tops
out at 3.0 Mbps plugged into the same router. Mac I/O has always been pathetic
compared to peecees for some reason. I don't know if the tuner helped this,
and I don't expect miracles anyway. Mabe the intel Macs will be better.
[ Reply to This ]

Apple releases Broadband Tuner 1.0
Authored by: Jerry Kindall on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 09:14 PM PST
How do I get rid of this stupid thing? My machine won't start up after I
installed it. Absolutely appalling.
[ Reply to This ]

Apple releases Broadband Tuner 1.0 - Authored by: bombarde on Tuesday, November 29 2005 @ 04:01 AM PST
Apple releases Broadband Tuner 1.0
Authored by: rspress on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 11:07 PM PST
Under a 5-6Mbps comcast.net broadband account it has taken the small little
stalls I had away. On some page loads like weather undergrounds member only
radar page loading the last 40 frames of radar data is faster by 5-20 seconds.

Good Stuff!
[ Reply to This ]

Apple releases Broadband Tuner 1.0
Authored by: mikaelf on Tuesday, November 29 2005 @ 02:19 AM PST
I upgraded last month from a ADSL 0.5/0.5 to a 8/0.8 and was disappointed
with my download speed after I applied this upgrade my download speed
almost dubbled (My max speed should be around 6 MBit/s as I live 3.1Km (a
little less than 2 miles) from my phonestation)
Before Broadband Tuner:
Receiving:

Max TCP: 1.86 Mbit/s
Max UDP: 6.73 Mbit/s
TCP/UDP: 27.7 %

After Broadband Tuner:
Reciving:

Max TCP: 3.99 Mbit/s
Max UDP: 6.65 Mbit/s
TCP/UDP: 60.0 %
 
Bob: Can you tell me how I can monitor before and after changes?

What software do you use to monitor broadband speed and are there particular sites you visit?

Thanks for the info from MacFixit.
 
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