<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by dj velocity:
I haven't touched Winmx or Morpheus in months and now whenever I give it a shot....
the connections only start at around 5K(cable-T1 hookup) and without fail will crash before the track is done.
All other data downloads are quick.
Just curious because I work with two people who also have cable connections and they're experiencing the same problem.
thanks for putting up with the nerd talk</font>
I get that a lot too. A lot of times when it happens, if you run netstat and tracert to see who you are downloading from, it ends up being someone not in North America......so transfer speeds will be a lot slower no matter what kind of connection either of you have. Whenever I find good trance on WinMX it inevitably comes from Germany or South America for some reason.
<uber geek>
Also this is a Windows TCP problem because the default settings in Windows are set for modem users. All TCP packets sent by one computer must be acklowledged as received by the other computer or else the sent packet will be assumed lost and sent again.
Windows does not wait for acklowledgement of each packet before it sends more, but it does have a buffer of unacklowldged packets waiting for acklowledgement. If this buffer gets full, it will stop sending packets until either one of the packets in the buffer times out, or gets an acklowldgement. The average time it takes a packet to be acklowledged is (2x?) the ping time to the computer you are connecting to.
With modems, transfer speed is slow enough that the buffer never gets full. With highspeed broadband networks (LAN/cable/DSL) the ping times within the network are low enough that the buffer will fill up, but total time spent with the buffer full is not a significant enough percentage of time to greatly affect transfer speeds.
Basically it means the maximum transfer rate you can achieve no matter how good your connection is:
~(buffer size)/(ping time)
or maybe (buffer size)/(2*ping time), I dunno
When you download from someone very far away generally satellite links are used. These networks can handle very high speed transfers, but there is a huge delay going through the satellite so the ping time goes up substantially. Thus the sending computer can send out packets really fast, and the receiving computer can receive them fast, but because the ping time is so long the sending computer spends most of it;s time with it;s sending buffer full of packets awaiting acklowledgement -- hence you get slow transfer speeds.
So to get faster transfers, the size of the TCP buffer must be increased. But I dunno if this buffer size is set by the sender or the receiver. If it is from the sender, there is not much you can do to increase speeds. But if it is set by the receiver then you can increase it and it should help. There is documentation on this on the web, but it s bookmarked on a different computer.... sorry.
</uber geek>
dan.
