Re: [p2p-hackers] TCP over UDP "magic number" questions

[Spencer Dawkins]

If you're trying to figure out what TCP is really, you might also look at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4614.txt, which is the IETF's best shot at hacking through the 100 or so RFCs that talk about TCP.   I note that RFC 889 doesn't seem to be listed. I think you can ignore it (unless the functionality got picked up in RFC 1122, which tried to capture the working lore several years after TCP was redesigned for congestion avoidance, etc.).   And it's also worth mentioning that TCP will WORK, for some value of "work", with a lot of simplifying assumptions. I'm not sure Nagle matters for anything except Telnet/FTP control channel-style communication, and you may not even know anyone who uses these protocols anymore - they are *so* last-century :-). There just aren't that many protocols that rely on server-end echos any more, and that's the problem Nagle was solving.   Thanks,   Spencer ----- Original Message ----- From: Michael Parker To: theory and practice of decentralized computer networks Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2006 6:16 PM Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] TCP over UDP "magic number" questions I think Mill's nonlinear filter was a proposed modification to TCP as described in RFC 889 that never made it. I suspect Van Jacobson's simple linear filter won out either because it was easy to implement or it produced better results in trials. (But it could be worth grepping for Mills in the Linux source code just to make sure.) Don't forget, none of these papers are very current -- both Nagle's and Van Jacobson's papers appeared in the 1987 proceedings of SIGCOMM. So if you don't see it in the latest RFCs (e.g., 2581), it probably didn't stand up to the test of time. As for Karn's algorithm, I think some BSD flavors go through empirically determined backoffs. I'm pretty sure the book TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 2 spells them out (indeed, all of the TCP/IP implementation) in their gory details. But just to get it running, I don't think doubling is a bad solution at all, as unless your connection is really hosed you won't be stepping through that many backoffs anyway. In a file transfer scenario, you can probably do without Nagle's algorithm. It's more useful in an interactive environment like a terminal, where it drastically increases the ratio of payload to header bytes. (Although some programs, to appear more responsive when echoing from a server, will turn it off through the TCP_NODELAY socket option.) - Mike

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