Briefly: Security Update 2005-009, Broadband Tuner

Security Update 2005-009:

Apple has just released a Security Update labeled "2005-009" through the Software Update utility.

The update provides the following changes:

Security Update 2005-009 delivers a number of security enhancements and is recommended for all Macintosh users.

This update includes the following components:

apache_mod_ssl
CoreFoundation
CoreTypes
curl
iodbcadmin
OpenSSL
Safari
sudo
syslog

For detailed information on this Update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n61798

Broadband Tuner:

Additionnally, Apple has released Broadband Tuner yesterday. This application provides performance improvements for high speed connections (>5Mbit) with high latency.

Here is the description provides by Apple:

The installer increases the default values for the size of the TCP send and receive buffers. With larger buffers more data can be in transit at once. A startup configuration file is also updated so that these changes will persist across restarts.

The system parameters are sysctl variables that are set as follows:
net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 131072
net.inet.tcp.recvspace: 358400
kern.ipc.maxsockbuf: 512000

This change has a system wide effect and is applied even if the network is not high speed connection with a high latency, with the exception of modem connections for which the system uses small default TCP buffer sizes.

Apple Broadband Tuner is available through this page.