Fedora Eight is out on the streets!

[Ben Scott]

On Nov 9, 2007 3:47 PM, mike shlitz <mshlitz at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ... I'm pretty much stuck with Comcast for TV and Internet.  I've had
> nothing but issues with their internet service ...

 My experience has been that consumer Internet performance varies
tremendously by locale.  So one guy can love his Comcast, another guy
in the next down over has nothing but problems.  :-(

> Several family members using the internet simultaneously, results in a
> slowdown ...

 You may want to look into traffic control (priority queuing,
bandwidth reservation, rate limiting) on your router.  The
interactions between multiple protocol streams can be complex,
especially on an asymmetric feed.

 The classic example is BitTorrent on an asymetric feed.  The feed
can suck down a lot, but can only send out a little; meanwhile, the
rest of the swarm is trying to suck a lot from you.  If you don't
properly cap the outgoing rate, you'll cause congestion, which impacts
everything.  For example, if I don't cap BitTorrent's outgoing rate, I
top out at around 150 Kbyte/sec incoming, and my connection is very
slow for web browsing.  If I cap outgoing at 36 Kbyte/sec, I get up to
600 Kbyte/sec incoming, and the web is still pretty responsive.

 In other words, telling it to go slower made things go faster.

-- Ben