This is a Good advice for other newbies like me trying to tweak a new Broadband Router/Firewall
I noticed a Major Bandwith performance decrease right after I upgraded my good old Linksys BEFR41 to a Netgear FR114P.
It took me couple days to find out it was only a bad MTU setting.
Make sure you set the router/firewall MTU to its optimal value.
I found a good article which explain out to do it.
I think, the setting was OK, but many DSL providers require a smaller setting. You can find this in the documentation of the DSL provider usually.
Optimal? You mean, small enough, because some providers have such problems.
Yours, VB.
Optimal means not too small and not too large. The default MTU at 1500 in the Netgear was too large. Optimal value in my case is 1456 according to the test describe in the link above.
"Setting your computer's MTU value too low would make downloading less efficient because a greater percentage of the packet is taken up by the packet header which contains a variety of information about the packet, source, and destination. However, setting the MTU too high can also decrease efficiency. Other computers on the Internet might not be able to handle MTU values of a certain size. If you set your computer's MTU value too high, some computers along the delivery path would be required to break these packets into smaller pieces before accepting them and passing them to the next computer. This "Stop. Break. Go." processing of packets can dramatically slow down data transfers."
I'd not call a compromize "optimal". But I don't want to nitpick ;-)
Yours, VB.
Ok... we are playing on words now :)
For my setup, 1456 is the largest MTU I can set without having fragmented packets.
Also, I started to notice decreased performance under 1400.
According to what I've read, the optimal value is the largest MTU that doesn't cause packet fragmentation. So is it really a compromize?
Cheers, C++. ;)
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