This is a very techie post, if you don’t want to play around with network settings and possibly put them back if things go wrong, look away now.

There’s some very interesting thoughts about getting the most from your home network by increasing the size of the information packets over at Coding Horror. All information sent over the network (and that includes requests for information) are broken down into manageable chunks first. In theory it doesn’t matter what order they appear in because they are reassembled at the other end.

What Jeff points out is that the amount of data included in each packet hasn’t really changed for a long time even though the performance and reliability of networking equipment has improved.

One reason for keeping packets small is that they must be resent if there is a problem. The larger the packet the more network traffic if there is a problem. But if you can rely on the network there is less need to keep the size down.

I couldn’t find the setting on my network card here, but then it may have been disabled as I’m on a corporate network and, in any case, I would probably make myself very unpopular with our System department if I did.

This is a project best left for small networks that you’re in charge of because settings must be changed on all the equipment on the network.

The performance benefits were quite impressive; copying files from a network share was about 28% faster and benchmarking software reported a 20% improvement.

If you are considering giving this a go, I strong recommend reading the whole article carefully, and the comments below as well.