Subject: Re: TCP Timeouts.
To: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
From: Darren Reed <darrenr@reed.wattle.id.au>
List: tech-net
Date: 01/29/2002 13:26:56
In some email I received from Jonathan Stone, sie wrote:
[...]
> My take (if you want it, as someone who's hacked TCP algorithms to
> work better on very-wet-string media) is that the current
> state-of-the-art is such that we shouldn't do this just yet. we should
> leave this to people willing and capable of hacking the source code
> for their TCP :-), and who are then responsible to their lab/upstream
> provider/ISP/whatever for any TCP traffic which isn't TCP-like.

The problem with the default retransmit timer is if TCP looses a packet
it can take a long time to work out it has gone missing if the data flow
isn't constant.

That's not always desirable when "a long time" is anything more than a
few seconds.

I understand that both ends may not always be capable of changing like
this, but if one end is and it is NetBSD then better chance of the other
end being that way too ;)

Darren