enabling TCP Slow Start on the HTTP server-side decreased internet round-trip page load time by 21% in this case; comments suggest an "ip route" command can also work

'A discussion with Vint Cerf, Van Jacobson, Nick Weaver, and Jim Gettys' -- the big guns! Great discussion (via Tony Finch)

'Tcprstat is a free, open-source TCP analysis tool that watches network traffic and computes the delay between requests and responses. From this it derives response-time statistics and prints them out.' Computes percentiles, too

'Any TCP session you initiate to one of the proxied IP addresses [specified on the command line] will be captured by sshuttle and sent over an ssh session to the remote copy of sshuttle, which will then regenerate the connection on that end, and funnel the data back and forth through ssh. Fun, right? A poor man's instant VPN, and you don't even have to have admin access on the server.'

'the [large] buffers are confusing TCP’s RTT estimator; the delay caused by the buffers is many times the actual RTT on the path.' [..] 'by inserting big buffers into the network, we have violated the design presumption of all Internet congestion avoiding protocols: that the network will drop packets in a timely fashion.'  QoS traffic shaping avoids this -- hooray for Tomato firmware

opportunistic encryption of TCP connections. not the simplest to set up, though

techie details from Adam Langley on how Google's been improving TLS/SSL, with lots of good tips. they switched in January to HTTPS for all Gmail users by default, without any additional machines or hardware

'a proxy server that works behind a NAT, even when the client is behind a NAT, without any 3rd party'. nifty, by Samy "MySpace worm" Kamkar