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Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

Read to the end of the article, folks.

This is what happened: he tweaked settings galore, hoping to squeeze out more performance somehow. Nerds tend to do this; it's natural.

However by removing the automatic settings and forcing it into one or more configurations that may have been suboptimal, performance actually decreased.

When he returned the settings to "fully automatic" everything was fine and dandy and maximal.

Moral of the story (and I quote): "Resist the urge to tinker with these settings."

You can basically ignore everything except that last line—and if you're familiar with the excellent AirPort Extreme, you probably already knew that.

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The problem is that there is no particular reason those configurations are suboptimal, except the empirical "it makes the router run slower." Enforcing 802.11n for instance. If settings that should be good choices end up having side effects, that's not a great design of the Airport Extreme.

I agree. Hence the warning.

Agreed, the settings should be more useful in general.

However, it's possible that the flexibility of the settings toward other cases (like using the router with older hardware, or less compatible or buggy devices) necessitate their presence and complexity. Seems likely to me that each of these settings has been placed due to a specific support case with the plethora of device data and testing cases that they must have from years of customer support.

I think, then, that the settings are not for the maximal optimal case, and the misunderstanding here is that the router is somehow not initialized for maximum performance. This may be true for other router brands, but in my experience, is not true for Apple.

In general, I agree that messing with random settings is not a great idea. But these particular settings are some that I would feel pretty confident messing with. Like setting a different 5Ghz network name is done for a particular reason, because you want to be able to choose 5Ghz or 2.4GHz for the connection, and you don't want it to switch back and forth as it wishes.

It seems that the autoswitching has gotten good enough to trust that it's making better decisions than you are about whether the 5GHz network is superior.

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