On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Tyler Vann-Campbell wrote:
> I concur with all of Ian's statements here, in addition, a quick google
> search returned a nice site on tuning network performance, in ways other
> than simply raising your MTU:
Unless for some reason your MTU is set to less than the maximum allowed by
the underlying logical frame size, randomly increasing the MTU will
probably just result in an error from ifconfig. Or in some weird
scenarios (tunneling other L2 protocols over ethernet, etc.) it might
even break the interface completely.
> http://www.psc.edu/networking/perf_tune.html#Linux
A good summary.
But it's important to understand what these options actually do to your
system before enabling them. There seems to be a simplistic philosophy
among some people that "bigger numbers are better" when tuning system
parameters. Well, it isn't always that simple. For example, increasing
the size of various network buffers beyond what's actually needed is just
wasting memory (multiplied over every active TCP connection on the
system). It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have gigantic TCP
buffers for every socket when your system is mostly used for interactive
telnet sessions (for example). Most of the network games these days
depend much more on packet latency than raw throughput.
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