MTU of the Internet?

Sean M. Doran smd at clock.org
Sun Feb 8 05:11:36 UTC 1998


Paul A Vixie <paul at 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.



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