Paul A Vixie <paul@vix.com> writes:
the fratricide thing someone else mentioned earlier today.
That would be Frank Kastenholz, who I am pleased to discover slumming here.
this hurts our benchmark numbers but helps the backbones (where i came from) and the origin servers (where some of my friends are). quite the dilemma.
Frankly, the backbones could care less these days. Heavily decorated micropackets are becoming less and less toxic; at least one implementation is known to smile and ask for more at OC12 rates, another has hardware that can probably do this too. Magic flow-based switching schemes that open VCs and so forth might be happier, but I don't know of any actually deployed in a "backbone" per se. Tli was just pointing out n messages ago that no matter how well you do in terms of aggregating data traffic into bigger chunks, you still will see an enormous number of small packets around (ACKs). You have to be prepared to switch those at line rate; engineering for some statistical mix of big and small packets is asking for a disaster when someone suddenly goes simplex. There is, however, the spectre of there being so many SYNs flying around that they alone might cause congestion collapse. I dunno if I should be frightened of that or not, but I am not one of your origin server friends. --:) Finally, could your explain the "benchmark" comment a bit? Sean.