Broadband Tuner 1.0
The Broadband Tuner from Apple 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. 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 have tested this on a 12Mbps connection and so far there is a 75% increase on download speed, but it will properly take weeks of testing to determine if it actually does speed up the connection. Worth a shot never the less..
Link: Broadband Tuner 1.0
Zach Forrester said,
Wrote on November 29, 2005 @ 12:35 am
I’ve just installed this on my iMac G3, running 10.4.3 with Rogers Highspeed and, things do feel a little zippier, but i guess time will tell
Eric said,
Wrote on November 29, 2005 @ 1:13 am
I’ve always wondered what the cons are to something like this. If there is no con, then why aren’t the default settings set to the above ones?
Don’t get me wrong, I still installed it, I’m just curious.
Jens Offersen said,
Wrote on November 29, 2005 @ 2:24 am
I was thinking the same thing Eric!
Must be a good reason somewhere.. It comes with an uninstaller incase anything goes wrong.
Aaargh! said,
Wrote on November 29, 2005 @ 9:30 am
The reason these aren’t the default settings is that there are no one-size-fits-all defaults, the default settings are probably meant for a normal ethernet network.
Pixel y Dixel » Apple Broadband Tuner said,
Wrote on November 29, 2005 @ 2:28 pm
[...] V?ɬ?a Cool OSX Apps. [...]
Bif said,
Wrote on November 29, 2005 @ 2:41 pm
Sooooooo, I’m assuming you just install it and it does it’s thing, cause I don’t see it as an app in the app list or under utilities. Where’d it go?
Jens Offersen said,
Wrote on November 29, 2005 @ 4:00 pm
Thats all there is to it Bif.
Zach Forrester said,
Wrote on November 29, 2005 @ 5:23 pm
woah…. i installed this last night (see above) and didnt notice a big dif in my browser speed, but this morning using acquisition i’ve been getting some of the fastest times i’ve ever had! although, i tested my bandwith over at http://www.bandwidthplace.com
Before installing broadband tuner, i was getting 2.1 MB/s
today, with Acquisition running i got 1.1MB/s, and then after quitting Acquisition, I got 450.4 KILOBYTES/s… my thoughts? the bandwidthplace.com speed test isnt terribly reliable.
over here http://www.internetfrog.com/mypc/speedtest/ I get 555/270 KB/s, after installing broadband tuner. I dont really know if thats better or not, since I didnt run the test before installing.
Im on rogers highs speed in Ontario, Canada
dalton said,
Wrote on November 30, 2005 @ 2:25 am
I seem to have better luck with Broadband Optimizer - my download speed increased by %20. Broadband Tuner didn’t do much for me.
cody said,
Wrote on November 30, 2005 @ 3:43 am
hey i had a question… i used this thing but i want to take it off my mac how do i get the uninstaller? i cant find it anywhere
Blaine Cook said,
Wrote on November 30, 2005 @ 6:22 am
Just a note on terminology, latency refers to the time it takes a packet to move from one computer to another, and is generally measured in milliseconds. Latency and “ping times” refer to the same concept.
Bandwidth, on the other hand, refers to the amount of data that a single connection is able to send per unit of time - 12 Mbps means 12 Megabits per second, or 12*1024 / 8 = 1.536 Megabytes per second.
When we combine these (ignoring TCP and other overhead for the sake of argument), we can do some simple calculations to determine some “optimal” buffer sizes. If we arbitrarily decide on 10 ms as an acceptable latency, then 12 Mbps * 0.01 s = 0.12 Mb = 125829 bits, which would be our maximal buffer to acheive a 10 ms latency. Lower latencies would require smaller buffers, while higher latencies would allow larger buffers.
This type of tweaking, though, should be done carefully. On networks with high packet loss (e.g. wireless with interference), having a larger socket buffer will make it that much more difficult for a packet to “get through”, and require retries, which manifest as an effective reduction of total bandwidth, possibly rendering the network unusable.
Try searching for “network tuning”, “tcp sendspace”, “tcp recvspace” and “maxsockbuf” for more detailed information. Linux has some very impressive adjustments that I’m fairly sure haven’t made their way back to FreeBSD / Darwin: http://www-didc.lbl.gov/TCP-tuning/linux.html has a description. Wikipedia has a more general discussion of Latency and Bandwidth at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_vs_Bandwidth
Wargen said,
Wrote on December 1, 2005 @ 6:49 am
Cody: I think to uninstall you just run the installer again and choose to uninstall.
cody said,
Wrote on December 1, 2005 @ 6:32 pm
thank you so much wargen
High Five (for Nerds) » Blog Archive » Windows: Boost Download Speeds said,
Wrote on March 13, 2006 @ 9:41 pm
[...] Here’s a little RegEdit tweak to push your download speeds up by cutting out several bytes of headers in each packet. This will then make your internet traffic smaller, allowing more space for data, and making it faster. This is for Windows, and if you have an Apple, then good for you! You can check out the Broadband Tuner 1.0 on this page, or this page of an OS X tweak program. Also, if you have a gigabit LAN, then you’re out of luck. The following tweak will make the connection slower. I don’t think this will work for dial-up, but I don’t think this will hurt either, so you might as well try. I know I will. [...]