Many people heavily involved in Internet gaming have reported excellent results with TweakMASTER. Reports include lower ping times and decreased latency. There are different issues than sheer speed for downloading files on the internet.

Network latency

Latency is the period of time that one component in a system is spinning its wheels waiting for another component. Latency, therefore, is wasted time. In networking, this is the amount of time it takes a packet to travel from source to destination. Together, latency and bandwidth define the speed and capacity of a network.

In general latency increases with packet size, so there would be a lower latency with smaller packets like 576 than with 1500. There is a certain amount of latency, usually measured in milliseconds at each hop along the route from your computer to the server you are trying to reach. The more hops encountered enroute, the higher the total latency over the network.

Latency is also typically a problem with oversold (under-capacity) ISPs which have insufficient network capacity for their subscribers. The usual symptoms of network under-capacity are high latency (the time it takes a packet to cross the network path from one end to the other) and packet loss (where transmitted data is literally lost because of insufficient network capacity). High latency has an adverse effect on interactive use; e.g., real-time gaming over the Internet. Packet loss has an adverse effect on just about everything.

Latency is usually not a major problem for general web surfing with a properly configured TCP Receive Window but high latency can adversely affect interactive applications such as online real-time gaming. As mentioned, high latency is usually caused by Internet routing and/or congestion issues.

A high-bandwidth, high-latency situation can be observed with many satellite-based Internet links. While the bandwidth may be as high as 768Kbits/sec, the lag time between clicking on a link or sending a command and actually receiving data back can be a second or more. This makes satellite Internet nearly useless for many online games, many of which demand a latency of less than half a second or better.

The TCP receive window default value is adequate for relatively slow dialup modems and for high-speed networks with relatively low latency (e.g., less than 20 milliseconds). Increasing the TCP Receive Window well above the default settings can often substantially improve throughput on high-speed (e.g., Cable Modem or DSL) connections where there is higher latency (e.g., 100-200 milliseconds), as is often the case on the Internet, particularly over long network paths. (Increasing the TCP Receive Window will usually not have an adverse effect on other connections.)

Try it!

In general it still comes down to experimentation. See the TweakMASTER Help file for more tips. Try different combinations of MTU and TCP receive window and see what seems to work best over a good cross-section of websites or applications where you typically use the Internet and do your gaming and see what works best.