I tweaked the PacketShaper a little this afternoon, after numerous comments that incoming connections were taking a long time (particularly e-mail related ones, like IMAP, and from multiple people). I think the single biggest thing I did was to bump up the priority on the Default class for the main college address space from priority 1 to priority 3 (higher is better). I seem to recall an offhand comment on the list at some point that the first few packets of a flow are usually unclassified and thus put into Default. Increasing the priority of that lets them through faster and then lets them get classified faster, allowing them to take advantage of the policies and partitions for their particular traffic type that much sooner. IMAP feels a lot faster, both in Pine and Mail.app now.
Posted by Rowan Littell at March 10, 2006 03:59 PM