Dave T??ht <d...@taht.net> wrote: >> You might claim that a little intermediate buffer space is a good >> thing, in that it can allow a short-term burst of packets to get >> through without having to discard other useful stuff, but only as long >> as most links have spare capacity most of the time. > > A *little* is just fine. Bloated buffers - containing hundreds, > thousands, tens of thousands of packets - which is what we are seeing > today - is not.
So basically what we see is equipment designed by incompetent designers, who probably have no experience with historic networks. When everything was still very slow (my first experience with TCP/IP was on amateur packet radio), the effects of bugs like this was very apparent, and one could immediately see the effects of changing parameters and implementation details. After that, probably a lot of engineers entered the scene that never saw a network slower than 100 Mbit ethernet, and made decisions without knowledge of early research that went into the design of TCP and other internet protocols. It is unfortunate that this incompetence now apparently affects the operation of the internet for everyone (although I have not recognized any adverse effects in daily use myself). On the network I manage myself, I always set a reasonable TCP window instead of the OS vendor default. Better a slight cap on the performance of a single session, than a congestion collapse of the network as a whole... (on amateur packet radio we used a TCP window of 864 bytes :-) _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions
