I’m usually pretty strict about staying vaguely on-topic, but this one had me baffled for a while, and I’d like to share the solution with you all.
Most times I connected my PC to the Net it would freeze up for 30 seconds or so. Extremely frustrating. I tried a ton of different solutions, spent hours Googling.
It turns out to be a problem with Windows XP service pack 2. This attempts to limit the number of concurrent part-opened network sockets to 10. This limit is too low. You can see if you’re suffering from this problem by checking your system event log and looking for “error 4226” warnings.
Unfortunately, in their unbounded wisdom Microsoft chose not to make this configurable via a registry entry. To fix it go here and download a tweak tool that mangles your network drivers.
This is particularly relevant to Skype users, as Skype is “connection hungry”.
Almost makes you want to buy a Mac. (Except I’m allergic to BSD trailing slash semantics…)
UPDATE: Just an FYI, this problem doesn’t rear its head when you boot your PC and the network connection already exists; in that case the applications start over a spread-out period of time. It’s when you boot everything, and then connect there’s a sudden rush to the connectivity exit and the tragedy occurs. Hey, Bill thought 640Kb was enough, so surely nobody will want to start more than 10 network connections at once…
Posted by Martin Geddes at 09:43 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/425.
I don't understand the rational for this change, unless it is intended to starve viruses and other malware. Does it apply to outgoing connections only? If it applied to incoming, it would certainly simplify denial of service attacks :-)
Posted by: at March 15, 2005 01:57 PM