Dear Vasant,
OK, I'll bite.
My copy of TCP/IP Illustrated, volume
1, shows TCP doing exponential backoff (page 299), at a pretty leisurely pace,
for about nine minutes before giving up. This is, of course, measured using a
general-purpose OS, but at some point - well, how long were you planning to
wait for TCP retransmissions?
I am somewhat confused as to how this lines up
with successfully retransmitting lost "events" in 10s of
ms.
I am somewhat confused as to how using TCP (with
exponential retransmission timers) is a substitute for application-level
timers. If you have to run application-level timers anyway... well, I thought
that was where SCTP came from!
Thanks for any insights you can
provide.
Spencer