Friday, January 15, 2010

Friends in high places


Sorted!

After a frustrating week of intermittent web access and, more worryingly, the inability to update my av programme, it's sorted.

After yesterday's post, a friend who spends a lot of his time at 35,00 feet (friends in high places - geddit), emailed from Singapore (see, you have nowhere to hide) to offer a solution.

The base problem turned out to be an issue with Orange, my ISP. It would appear that they have a problem with capacity. They would, of course, not admit to that. The French never get anything wrong do they?

Ignoring Orange for a second, I could resolve the issue at my end by adjusting my
MTU settings (nod wisely and pretend you understand). I eventually found that this setting could be adjusted from within the router (keep nodding) and reduced the pre-set number from 1500 to 1400. Lo and behold everything started working normally again.

Proof, if ever proof were needed, that size does matter. Thanks Steve, you're a star
.

3 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Carolina said...

Isn't he just the best? :o)

Unknown said...

Alex - nice to speak to you earlier.

I've just done looking into this and I feel that the optimum packet size (Maximum Transmission Unit - MTU) is 1454.

The standard setting (1492) gives you 32 data cells in each packet but the final cell contains 10 bytes of padding.

By changing to 1454 you only get 31 cells per packet but the final cell contains no padding.

On a 1MBs connection, by losing this wasted padding, this should equate to a (theoretical maximum) 6.9KBs speed improvement.