[6533] in North American Network Operators' Group

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post

Re: NAP/ISP Saturation WAS: Re: Exchanges that matter...

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vadim Antonov)
Tue Dec 17 16:12:08 1996

Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 12:57:27 -0800
From: Vadim Antonov <avg@pluris.com>
To: avg@pluris.com, cnordin@vni.net
Cc: doleary@cisco.com, nanog@merit.edu

Craig Nordin  <cnordin@vni.net> wrote:

>> Er.  There's no such thing as perfect transport as long as TCP is
>> concerned.  If end-hosts support large windows, even a single
>> TCP session will load the network to the point where it'll lose
>> packets.

>What you say here makes sense to me.  But, out of a 500
>ping sample over the course of half a day, I was getting well
>below one percent loss -- six months ago.

Most TCP sessins are pretty short, in fact.  They simply have
no chance to open window.   Also, there's a lot of old TCP
implementations which have window limited to 64Kb (or less!).

>Now, my same sample group is going for more than three percent,
>with many ten percent loss routes showing...

Well, nobody argues that Internet is overloaded.  But the question
of how to measure the congestion is not as simple as just pinging.

The problem is that there's no reasonable way to learn loss
statistics from routers.

--vadim

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post