Re: shim-aware transports

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>]

On 17-aug-2005, at 17:31, Spencer Dawkins wrote:

> when we were discussing TCP in TRIGTRAN, we pretty quickly  
> converged on NOT notifying transports when bandwidth available  
> changed, because TCPs have to respond to losses, and adding  
> additional hints just adds stack complexity beyond the complexity  
> that is unavoidable.

Well, I'm sorry to have to say it, but that's just STUPID.

What if I have a 119 MB/s gigabit ethernet link and a 1 kB/s GSM data  
connection, and I'm downloading a nice big file with my fully RFC  
1323-compliant IP stack, and then the gigabit link goes down so I  
rehome to the GSM link.

Suppose the file is coming from 100 ms away, so my window is 12 MB or  
so. That means that worst case, my GSM link could be saturated for  
more than THREE HOURS because of that single window worth of data  
that's in flight.

This "complexity is scary" belief in IETF is getting ridiculous and  
then some. (While at the same time you need to read some 20 RFCs to  
implement SNMPv3. Good thing they never went for a "complex network  
management protocol".)