Have We Decided Tweaking Datacards Is No Longer Beneficial??

ebiz

There has not been much chatter about tweaking datacards in the past few months. Perhaps that is because the network has improved so much we don't feel the need.

Did we ever decide in a Rev A environment whether it was better to leave the cards at an RWIN of 17520 or just set them to 65536 and be done with it?

For those of you who weren't around then, running TCP analyzer at www.speedguide.net/analyzer.php gives you the RWIN and leads you to a host of info on tweaking.
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Vista64 & EX720

Fox McCloud · EVDO Junkie Joined: 02 Dec 2006 Posts: 599

basically, FireFox had an upload issue with Sprint for some reason...this has been recently fixed, therefore, the registry fix isn't really ncessary anymore.

The MTU isn't too difficult to find and apply to your Ethernet/Wi-Fi card (of course, if the EVDO card is inserted into your laptop, you can't change the MTU, IIRC)...and the RWIN? Well, that's more personal experimentation more than anything else....so is changing your HA.

So, there's really only 3 tweaks left anymore for EVDO;

-MTU (fixed value, once you calculate it, then there's absolutely no need to experiment with this value).
-RWIN (experimentation is best with this one...YRMV)
-HA (again, experimentation is best...usually the one that is closest to use works the best; again, YRMV).

I recently reformatted my PC; I didn't bother adjusting the RWIN this time (it's left blank currently); I only adjusted the MTU....and kept my HA on the one I know gives me the lowest latency and highest download speed....so, either Sprint has changed something, or I'm just not seeing it now, but RWIN doesn't seem to have as big of an impact as it once did.

ebiz · Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2008 3:09 pm Post subject:

Are you a Vista user, Fox? It doesn't seem to let you change RWIN settings the way XP does. I mentioned the glitch at www.evdoforums.com/thread9092.html .

On the other hand I am getting a nice speed boost with the fix at www.evdoforums.com/thread9092.html .
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Vista64 & EX720

Fox McCloud · EVDO Junkie Joined: 02 Dec 2006 Posts: 599

I have several copies of Vista Business just lying around (I got them for free...no I did not pirate them), I've only installed one of them, and haven't really done a whole lot with it....

However, I am considering replacing XP Pro SP2 with Vista Business (then upgrading to Ultimate) in the future.

I used Dr. TCP to change my RWIN on Vista, but I didn't do extensive testing on whether it did anything or not.

ebiz · Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2008 5:53 pm Post subject:

J_Walker · EVDO Heavy User Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 115

Vista auto-tunes the TCP stack, so if you want to set a fixed RWIN you need to disable auto-tuning. I've left auto-tuning on and get identical performance as my XP machine with a tweaked RWIN.

ebiz · Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 6:48 pm Post subject:

J, no question that's the case for your setup and location, but there are still many who find themselves operating at 200-800KB. Guess that is what drives experimentation.

MydigitalLife.info provided a good explanation of the RWIN issue with Vista in an article on 15Dec07. I commend it to those curious about increasing their speeds. It explains the situations in which dissabling TCP/IP Auto-Tuning can help.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/12/15/vista-tcp-window-scaling-auto-tuning-may-slow-down-network-performance/
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Vista64 & EX720