On 10/21/07, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
Windows Vista, and next week Mac OS X Leopard introduced a significant improvement to the TCP stack, Window Auto-Tuning. FreeBSD is committing TCP Socket Buffer Auto-Sizing in FreeBSD 7. I've also been told similar features are in the 2.6 Kernel used by several popular Linux distributions.
Today a large number of consumer / web server combinations are limited to a 32k window size, which on a 60ms link across the country limits the speed of a single TCP connection to 533kbytes/sec, or 4.2Mbits/sec. Users with 6 and 8 MBps broadband connections can't even fill their pipe on a software download.
With these improvements in both clients and servers soon these systems may auto-tune to fill 100Mbps (or larger) pipes. Related to our current discussion of bittorrent clients as much as they are "unfair" by trying to use the entire pipe, will these auto-tuning improvements create the same situation?
I can see "advanced operating systems" consuming much more bandwidth in the near future then is currently the case, especially with the web 2.0 hype. In the not so distant future I imagine a operating system whose interface is purely powered by ajax, javascript and some flash with the kernel being a mix of a mozilla engine and the necessary core elements to manage the hardware. This "down to earth" construction of the operating system interface will allow it to potentially be offloaded onto a central server allowing for really quick seamless deployment of updates and security policies as well as reducing the necessary size of client machine hard drives. Not only this but it'd allow the said operating system to easily accept elements from web pages as replacements of core features or additions to already existent features (such as replacing the tray clock with a more advanced clock done in javascript that is on a webpage and whose placement could be done by a simple drag and drop of the code sniplet). Such integration would also open the possibility of applications being made purely of a mixture of various web elements from various webpages. Naturally such a operating environment would be much more intense with regards to its bandwidth consumption requirements but at the same time I can see this as reality in the near future....