Any way to force a smaller TCP window on WIndows ME and XP?

I have had intermittent problems with my wireless network for a year, mostly
transferring large files. After trying other things and looking hard at the
behavior and my networking texts, I have a theory as to what is causing
it -- The receive window being used by TCP/IP is larger than the buffer
space in my router, such that if I am sending from a destination with a
faster link to one with a slower link the packets pile up in the router and
eventually start getting lost. What makes this even worse is that by the
time this happens I'm sure the TCP/IP timeout times are set fairly long
(because of all the data being buffered), meaning detection and recovery are
going to be quite slow allowing the application using it (i.e. file transfer
or printer sharing) to time out.

I haven't figured out how to confirm this yet, but it fits the behavior,
which is that I get failures primarily transferring large files between
machines over the wireless network, especially when the target machine is
the most distant one from the wireless access point (and thus likely to have
the slowest transmit speed.

One thing I'd like to try if it can be done is to force a smaller receive
window on my machines to prevent them from overrunning the router. Can this
be set somehow?

--
Warren Montgomery (E-Mail Removed) (
http://home.att.net/~wamontgomery )

In article <I4ednbw_S_cpf2-iRVn-(E-Mail Removed)>, "warren montgomery"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>I have had intermittent problems with my wireless network for a year, mostly
>transferring large files. After trying other things and looking hard at the
>behavior and my networking texts, I have a theory as to what is causing
>it -- The receive window being used by TCP/IP is larger than the buffer
>space in my router, such that if I am sending from a destination with a
>faster link to one with a slower link the packets pile up in the router and
>eventually start getting lost. What makes this even worse is that by the
>time this happens I'm sure the TCP/IP timeout times are set fairly long
>(because of all the data being buffered), meaning detection and recovery are
>going to be quite slow allowing the application using it (i.e. file transfer
>or printer sharing) to time out.
>
>I haven't figured out how to confirm this yet, but it fits the behavior,
>which is that I get failures primarily transferring large files between
>machines over the wireless network, especially when the target machine is
>the most distant one from the wireless access point (and thus likely to have
>the slowest transmit speed.
>
>One thing I'd like to try if it can be done is to force a smaller receive
>window on my machines to prevent them from overrunning the router. Can this
>be set somehow?

See http://www.dslreports.com/drtcp
--
Best Wishes,
Steve Winograd, MS-MVP (Windows Networking)

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