This could be why the internet at the LAN is slow!

It's called Buffer Bloat. It's caused by router/switchs having too much memory on their buffers. It more involved that this but here's a short explaination. On a network, packets are supposed to be dropped. This tells the sender that the max speed of the connection has been hit. If a large buffer gets filled up with packets that are a download, they aren't dropped right away like their supposed to. They fill the buffer instead. This delays the sending of the dropped packet message. The sender not only keeps sending them, but also speeds up because it dosen't know the max speed has been hit. Now there's a huge que of packets that are waiting to go out a particular connection. If someone else is also trying to send something else out that link, say a game packet, it has to wait in line too. So the bigger the buffer, the longer it has to wait to be sent. If the buffer was small, the downloader would know to send less packets and slow down right away. Then the game packet would through much quicker.
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Add more channels? ...If that would even be possible with today's normal setups...

I'm really trying to put my head around this one...

Packets on a network are not supposed to be dropped. A TCP connection between two hosts is controlled by the windowing process, meaning if the receiving host cannot keep up with the amount of traffic being sent, it tells the sender to slow down. Most networks and NICs are fast enough today that they can handle all traffic coming in from their generally slower WAN connections. You would only need a buffer if there is congestion on a link or a collision. Internet traffic was slower in the past at the LAN because you had a ton of users on a slow link. At the last LAN though, I believe the connection was 50mbps and we didn't see much slowness at all.

Don't know if I'm buying into this much. It probably happens, but not often.

Or find a way to have each type of packet to be buffered independently, like VoIP (and HTTP?). It seems like having certain packets be able to take better priority over others could help. If say you are at a LAN and somebody is trying to update their windows for the first time since the silent film era, and I have to wait in line for my headshot to come through, somebody is getting a keyboard to the face. On the other hand, another packet priority process would involve yet another queue system implementation which in itself would need more allocated memory, which it seems could cause each type to have its own bufferbloating problem. This isn't Russia, I hate lines. A few other things come to mind like simply having faster memory, separate lines for the downloaders, and also something similar to etherchannel(sp?) to where you have less packets in buffer and more flowing because of certain markers that keep the packets in order as they are bounced around. Just my 2 cents, which might as well be ears of corn because I most likely have no idea what I'm talking about...

DrDeath wrote: Packets on a network are not supposed to be dropped. A TCP connection between two hosts is controlled by the windowing process, meaning if the receiving host cannot keep up with the amount of traffic being sent, it tells the sender to slow down.

Packet loss is the way it tells the sending computer to slow down. There's no way for either computer to know the speed of the connection at every point between them. The sending computer starts slow and ramps up as more and more packets are acknowleged by the reciever. When the flow starts to outpace the connection, packets are dropped. The sender is informed which causes it to cut back. Then starts to increse in speed again until there's another packet loss. This allows the connection to always run as fast as possible, even when traffic starts to congest at a router.

DrDeath wrote: You would only need a buffer if there is congestion on a link or a collision.

Every router/switch has a buffer to que packets coming in from multiple links wanting to go out on the same link. It's the overly large size of them now-a-days that is the problem.

Myfreecams, nuf said.

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