mbigna
12-22-01, 02:03 AM
My Mea Culpa!
I pulled this article from lockergnome.com (from where I propagated the original story). I posted some information trying to help someone speed up his net connection. I/we now stand (sit) corrected:
XP Bandwidth Freedom is a Myth
Scribbled by Mike Byrns
Yet another news outlet innocently spreading disinformation. It was wrong then, and no matter how many times it's written up as Gospel, it's still wrong. From the article, "XP seems to want to reserve 20% of the bandwidth for itself even with QoS disabled." I don't see any mention of the test methodology. I'd attribute that to the fact that no testing was actually done at all. The tweak author found a seemingly interesting setting, thought he understood it and began to boundlessly pontificate on the greatness of his "tweak." The truth is, unless you are running both QoS on a given network connection AND QoS-aware applications that are currently asking to reserve bandwidth on that connection, NO bandwidth is reserved. None. Nada.
Even when said applications are reserving bandwidth, they only do it before initiating a QoS-aware stream and they release it after. Try this for yourself: transfer a large file across your LAN while watching the bandwidth monitor in task manager. Now apply this self-proclaimed "tweak." Repeat the file transfer. Unless your copy of Windows XP contains different networking code than mine and the other few dozen folks who I've had try this over the past few weeks, you won't see a difference.
In order to rule out task manager "hiding" this bandwidth as was suggested to me by a few of the Microsoft conspiracy theorists, I had my LAN admin measure bandwidth between my port and the port my test machine was connected to by monitoring bandwidth usage at the Cisco switch that connects us. He says it's even QoS compliant. Guess what? NO DIFFERENCE. Please let your readers know! XP and Microsoft get enough bad press as it is, some of it (admittedly) well deserved.
I pulled this article from lockergnome.com (from where I propagated the original story). I posted some information trying to help someone speed up his net connection. I/we now stand (sit) corrected:
XP Bandwidth Freedom is a Myth
Scribbled by Mike Byrns
Yet another news outlet innocently spreading disinformation. It was wrong then, and no matter how many times it's written up as Gospel, it's still wrong. From the article, "XP seems to want to reserve 20% of the bandwidth for itself even with QoS disabled." I don't see any mention of the test methodology. I'd attribute that to the fact that no testing was actually done at all. The tweak author found a seemingly interesting setting, thought he understood it and began to boundlessly pontificate on the greatness of his "tweak." The truth is, unless you are running both QoS on a given network connection AND QoS-aware applications that are currently asking to reserve bandwidth on that connection, NO bandwidth is reserved. None. Nada.
Even when said applications are reserving bandwidth, they only do it before initiating a QoS-aware stream and they release it after. Try this for yourself: transfer a large file across your LAN while watching the bandwidth monitor in task manager. Now apply this self-proclaimed "tweak." Repeat the file transfer. Unless your copy of Windows XP contains different networking code than mine and the other few dozen folks who I've had try this over the past few weeks, you won't see a difference.
In order to rule out task manager "hiding" this bandwidth as was suggested to me by a few of the Microsoft conspiracy theorists, I had my LAN admin measure bandwidth between my port and the port my test machine was connected to by monitoring bandwidth usage at the Cisco switch that connects us. He says it's even QoS compliant. Guess what? NO DIFFERENCE. Please let your readers know! XP and Microsoft get enough bad press as it is, some of it (admittedly) well deserved.