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A Reliable Broadband Speed Test

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:52:25 +0000

One of the first things that users do when they get a broadband Internet connection is to visit so called speed tests on the Internet that measure the upload and download speed of a connection. This is great for bragging rights but also a good way to check if the advertised speeds are the real speeds. Most Internet providers tend to use phrases like “up to” to advertise their Internet connections.

One major problem is the reliability of those speed tests on the Internet. Some show lower speeds even if the Internet connection is able to handle faster speeds. This can be due to server capacities at the speed test host, the location of the servers in the world or general routing problems that affect the measured speed.

Speed.io is the first broadband speed test on the Internet that measured the speed of an Internet connection correctly. Every other speed test was usually missing a few thousand Kbits. The service measures the download and upload speed, the maximum number of connections and the response time of the Internet connection.

The download speed test result was 14806 Kbit and the result of the upload speed test was 990 Kbit which comes close to the maximum capacities of the 16 Mbit / 1 Mbit advertised speed of the Internet provider.

The developers of Speed.io claim to utilize 50.000 servers world wide for their speed tests which seems an awful lot but would be an incredible infrastructure if this was the case. Still, it does not really matter if they have 1 or 50K servers as long as the speed tests are accurate.

EventID 4226: TCP/IP has reached the security limit

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 08:14:42 +0000

Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista have both a TCP/IP connection limit that limits the half-open connections of the system. If that limit is reached a new entry in the Event Viewer is created stating “EventID 4226: TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.”.

It is not absolutely clear to me why Microsoft did set the limitation, some possible reasons could be to prevent worms and other malicious scripts from spreading to fast or to limit filesharing. Users will most likely notice that something is wrong when running P2P clients, slow downloads and timeouts are indicators that the limit is set.

Thankfully a solution exists that can patch the file tcpip.sys and remove the security limit. To do that you need to download the file Vista TCP Patch, open an elevated command prompt with administrator rights and enter the following command. VistaTcpPatch /n X with X being the maximum amount of half-open connections allowed on that system.

The computer needs to be restarted afterwards. Some users reported that they needed to execute Vista TCP Patch from the \Windows\System32\ folder to make it work.

Windows XP users can download and run the software EventID 4226 Patcher Version 2.23d instead which basically does the same thing but sets the limit to 50 half-open connections.

Vista TCP Patch (for Windows Vista)
EventID 4226 Patcher Version 2.23d (for Windows XP)