On Fri, 25 Jan 2008, Ben Scott wrote:
I suspect this is just bursting/clamping, as you suspect, but you may also want to investigate traffic shaping at your end. I've found I get much better *receive* throughput if I limit my *transmit* rate to less than nominal maximum. Presumably, this has to do with the fact that the feed is asymmetric; I can receive much faster than I can send, and so the send channel becomes congested and that impacts TCP ACK or other protocol control messages.
If you're the Linux router type, check out Wondershaper. It's a simple set of QoS tools, and it's literally a wonder. I can saturate my outbound on Cox and still run ssh or play an FPS with no real hassle. Swapping to something Linksys flavored the last time I took my firewall down for hardware changes was actually noticeable. - billn