James said:
Just playing low limit poker in my spare time last evening, online.
Typically play at tables that don't offer disconnection
protection...for other reasons. I know that my internet connection
was stable and I would go to open a browser window that would display
a video (i.e. YouTube or something) and it would start queueing my
traffic and disconnecting me mid-hand. Every time this happened, I'd
check the event log and...sure enough. While I cannot blame any
"losses" incurred after the first incident on anyone other than
myself, it's an intentional design flaw...not the remnants of a beta
product. The point is...this limitation can completely screw people
that actually use their computer to any semblance of its potential.
I'm not sure what to say about this - it "shouldn't" happen in the scenario
you describe and I've made far 'higher' use of the Internet than what you
describe without seeing this issue.
I only see the problem with connection limiting when running peer to peer
software, because of a peculiar situation this causes, and I would not
expect to see this error in 'normal use'. I'm not sure if you understand
when these events occur exactly (forgive me if that isn't the case) so I'm
going to outline a few things here.
Firstly, this error is not related to how many network connections you have
open on your LAN or to the Internet. It isn't an error you would expect to
be caused by opening too many web browser windows, or by having too many
'ports' connected on your machine.
Instead, this error refers to ports held in a particular state (usually
shown as "SYN_Waiting" if you open a command line and type 'netstat -a')
which is generally referred to as a 'half-open' port. This is part of the
normal connection 'dialogue' of any TCP/IP connection (e.g. any connection
over the Internet, for a start) but due to the way many peer to peer
networking systems (including network worms!) operate they open a larger
number of these connections at any one time than you would normally expect.
TCP/IP Limiting is designed to put a break on the amount of connections held
in this state at any one time, and the number allowed is set a little low
but should actually be ample for the majority of workstation use.
So if you're not running a peer to peer application, it is rather odd to see
this message appear. I'd look very carefully at the applications you're
running and the ports they are opening if you are not running anything you
might expect to cause this problem.
As for it being a 'fault' in the operating system, while I feel that
Microsoft's reasoning for adopting this approach is an example of
astonishing stupidity, it is difficult to really call it a "fault" in the
OS - it's designed to work in a certain way and achieves that design. Of
course, lots of aspects of Vista's design have been causing me to say things
like this lately, but then this is Microsoft's product and they've made
their choices. We can vote with our wallets if we dislike those choices.
Even on a Mac OSX laptop which does NOT use this rate-limiting approach I
have seen a problem with Internet performance with peer to peer networking
programs due to the large amount of connections they attempt to open at
once. I find a good approach is to limit the peer to peer program itself -
perhaps this is something you might consider.
