Growing Pains

Posted by stephen on Thursday, 16th February, 2006 @ 13:42

Within a few hours of my last post the Camino projected released version 1.0 of their browser as a Universal binary. And just now I found these instructions for getting the Azureus BitTorrent client working on Intel Macs which has done the trick. It seems like life gets a little easier every day!

Except when it comes to wireless networking. I've encountered a rather annoying problem where any meaningful amount of data transfer over an Airport connection results in rather spikey performance. Copying a large file I initially saw transfer of around 4Mbyte/sec, which is way higher then I've ever seen before. Then it stops completely for a few seconds, then it resume at a couple of hundred Kbytes/s. Needless to say it can't even fulfil the full potential of my broadband connection, let alone moving files around the local network.

And it seems I'm not the only one with this problem, I've seen lots of messages on the Apple forums about it. In the exact same spot my G5 and my PowerBook perform flawlessly. The problem occurs with my Airport Express or my Mac Mini doing Internet sharing.

It's possible the explanation is that the Intel chipset used for wireless often activates a power-save mode that most access points don't cope with very well. On a Windows computer it's possible to check a box to deactivate this power saving feature. Unfortunately the same is not true of OS X. But that does leave the hope that Apple can fix this in software.

To get around it I've made a hole in my bedroom floor and passed an Ethernet cable downstairs behind some heating pipes and on to my switch. Very 20th Century! It's not exactly a solution for everyone though, especially if the same problems are encountered with the MacBook Pro.

There's one advantage at least, I can transfer files at around 12Mbytes/second now!