WAN transfer rates

Bora Akyol bora at cisco.com
Tue May 11 23:44:45 UTC 2004


I think the real answer is more complex, if I remember this correctly:

The real transfer results depend on a lot of things, but the foremost
parameter that dominates the transfer rates for a single TCP session is
the duration of the session. If the session is short-lived, regardless 
of what the maximum window size is, the transfer rate will be abysmal 
unless the TCP stack is modified to guesstimate the initial window.

For long lived TCP sessions, you want to have enough packets in flight 
to fill the bandwidth delay product of the link to get the maximum 
throughput.

Mark Allman, Sally Floyd, and quite a few other people have published 
numerous papers on this topic.

Essentially the answer is that the transfer rates diminish with 
increasing latency if and only if the sessions are short-lived.
This becomes a huge problem especially on high bandwidth satellite links 
where some real "interesting" TCP hacks are employed. Now add a DNS 
lookup or two to the beginning of the sessions and things really start
to look bad for short-duration traffic over high latency links.

When you have many TCP sessions competing for the same link, then things 
start to look up.

Regards,

Bora Akyol


> On 11-mei-04, at 10:24, Jeff Nelson wrote:
> 
>> I realize that transfer rates across the Internet diminish significantly
>> with latency, but what's the good answer for someone shrunk down to
>> <10Mbps when the smallest pipe between them is 100Mbps and latency is
>> <40ms?





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