nanog mailing list archives

Re: 923Mbits/s across the ocean


From: "David G. Andersen" <dga () lcs mit edu>
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2003 12:59:55 -0500


On Sun, Mar 09, 2003 at 02:25:25PM +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum quacked:

On Sat, 8 Mar 2003, Joe St Sauver wrote:

you will see that for bulk TCP flows, the median throughput is still only
2.3Mbps. 95th%-ile is only ~9Mbps. That's really not all that great,
throughput wise, IMHO.

Strange. Why is that? RFC 1323 is widely implemented, although not
widely enabled (and for good reason: the timestamp option kills header
compression so it's bad for lower-bandwidth connections). My guess is
that the OS can't afford to throw around MB+ size buffers for every TCP
session so the default buffers (which limit the windows that can be
used) are relatively small and application programmers don't override
the default.

  Which makes it doubly a shame that the adaptive buffer tuning
tricks haven't made it into production systems yet.  It was
a beautiful, simple idea that worked very well for adapting to
long fat networks:

  http://www.acm.org/sigcomm/sigcomm98/tp/abs_26.html

  -dave

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      MIT Laboratory for Computer Science           http://www.angio.net/
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