Furcadia/Tricks/Faster Downloads

From FurcadiaWiki

DEP Re-wrote most of how their fileserver works. It's a lot faster, and all of these in-code optimizations are now unnessicary. I removed the opimizations I wrote from all of my code. I'm leaving this visable because it's handy for understanding how not to do a network stack --Kunnis 02:14, 30 Aug 2005 (EDT)

Furcadia's fileserver has problems with it's networking stack, so there are some workarounds to help deal with it.

Short Version

Note: This tends to work best on people with cable connections, I'm not sure how it will work on people with dialup, but I'd doubt it would hurt. Put your feedback into the talk section.

• Close Furcadia.
• Open C:\Program Files\Furcadia\Settings.ini using notepad.
• Find the lines that start with DownloadPacketSize and DownloadPacketCount, change them to:

 DownloadPacketSize = 4096
 DownloadPacketCount = 2

• Save the file and close.
• Restart Furcadia.

Long Version

So why does the above work?

It appears that the Fileserver doesn't properly deal with the write buffer being full. If I tell the server to send me 500 blocks at once (I've tried this) It only sends the first few, and then the buffer gets full, and it silently drops all of the other packets. After a bit of trial and error, it appears that this buffer is exactly 8k. That means the buffer can be filled by 4096 * 2 bytes. This prevents the buffer from getting too full and dropping the remainder of the message.

For uploads, the client's networking stack is much better, so I think that you can use full speed if you write your own implmentation.