In message <2.2.32.19960806173812.00711b8c@mail.cts.com>, "Kent W. England" wri tes:
NANOG Folks;
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Now, is there more data to bolster or refute these conclusions? I've done what I can with what I've found, but there just isn't much data to go on anymore. But I think it is pretty consistent with the view that a lot of the traffic is WWW TCP sessions of a few kilobytes. Would you agree? Would path MTU discovery help or could we all just informally set the Internet default MTU up to 1500 bytes [as John Hawkinson suggested on big-internet] and suffer a few fragmented slow speed links. Are most PPP MTUs set at the default 1500 or no?
--Kent
Hi there Kent, Persistant connections is a prominant feature of HTTP 1.1, now in draft. Maybe someone who follows that WG can comment on its progress. If on average there are 2-3 inline images per page (reasonable estimate IMO, though I have no data to back this up), then the average transfer size will increase. I've heard (verbal at NANOG) that Netscape has promised to support persistant connections, with the only caveat that they will open one connection for the page itself and another for all the inlines so they can start rendering the first inline while a long page is being read. They can probably avoid this for short pages. This could lead to a significant improvement in the ability of the Internet traffic to respond to low levels of packet drop and make good use of TCP congestion control, plus it will significantly improve the speed of transfer on uncongested paths where currently TCP never gets out of the initial slow start. Curtis ps- If this isn't too off topic, does anyone know what servers and clients (if any) currently support persistant connections?