IPX Revisited

[airforce2]

Pete;

Please accept a monster-sized thank you for the dual-protocol support in the latest WideFS!

The road has been rocky since the switchover from IPX to TCP/IP several years ago. I had, over time, stabilized things into a reasonably smooth system, but the recent combo of Win XP SP2 and all the networking changes it brought, then FS9.1, and then a motherboard failure, threw everything out of whack again, and I have simply not been able to get it under control. Though FS was clearly writing a steady stream of packets, they were arriving to the clients in bunches, with surging and ratcheting readily apparent all over the distributed system. I think there are simply too many processes that touch on TCP/IP control, due to security, internet throughput and other issues.

To make a long story short, I installed IPX on my two Win XP Pro machines, and in a few minutes I had a near-perfect smooth flow of data. Coupling FS 9.1 running at 30 fps with the latest Project Magenta builds yields the best performance I've seen on a distributed FS system ever. I can't imagine ever going back to TCP/IP...hope you'll continue to support it in WideFS.

Cheers

[Pete Dowson]

To make a long story short, I installed IPX on my two Win XP Pro machines, and in a few minutes I had a near-perfect smooth flow of data. Coupling FS 9.1 running at 30 fps with the latest Project Magenta builds yields the best performance I've seen on a distributed FS system ever. I can't imagine ever going back to TCP/IP...hope you'll continue to support it in WideFS.

Yes, I will. I was very surprised too, not so much with it's performance compared with TCP/IP (here it is slightly better, nothing to write home about). What amazed me was that I had none of the difficulties I had originally when I first tried it with WinXP.

The only difference here, really, is XP's SP1 (I've not dared install SP2 yet). So I can only put the original troubles down to possible bugs in the first XP release.

Regards,

Pete