I do believe people here keep confusing buffers with bandwidth.
Increasing buffers increases the burst bandwidth of your connection, but
does nothing to change the steady bandwidth of your connection.
Another inaccuracy, I believe, in your statement is that the ISP isn't
the one determining the rate at which packets are sent to you. The TCP
on the server you connect to is. On a similar note, the ISP does not
control your window size or rate, your own TCP does. The ISP can only
affect the line characteristics, nothing else.
When another machine connects to you, it will burst the data until
packets start to drop. The steady state of the connection will be what
you paid for - no amount of buffering can change that. This means that
the rate at which the sending TCP sends out the data will be identical
to the rate at which you pull it from the ISP's buffers, and the buffers
will remain full.
Let's say your down connection is 2Mb/s, and the ISP has 256KB (2
seconds worth) of buffers. If you limit your incoming speed (at your
end) to 1.8Mb/s, all sending TCP will learn it and send stuff out at
1.8Mb/s. Even if the ISP's buffers burst and fill up, they will be
deflated at 0.2Mb/s, which means that at steady state, they will be
empty. Mission accomplished, and no significant degradation of bandwidth.
There really is no need to cut your bandwidth in half over this.
Shachar
--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
Have you backed up today's work? http://www.lingnu.com/backup.html
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