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From: mostek@PECAN.CRAY.COM (James Mostek)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: More on TCP Performance Limits
Message-ID: <9101151425.AA03304@pecan29.cray.com>
Date: 15 Jan 91 14:25:47 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 25



It seems that most of the contributors are pointing out that IP
limits the performance of TCP/IP with the TTL and ID fields.
They claim that IP would break if too many packets are in the network
at any point in time (two packets could have the same ID).

However, if IP builds a packet for TCP with bad data,
TCP will drop the packet and it will be retransmitted.
TCP's checksum will certainly show an improper packet.

This is a very obscure case (an ID from a later
fragment arrives before its predecessor).
So we are not talking about many retransmissions.

TCP is built to handle bad data.
I'm not familiar with UDP, how would it handle this?

I don't think people should make the calculations in previous mails
to claim that TCP/IP's performance is limited by IP's ID and
TTL fields.

Jim Mostek
Cray Research, Inc
mostek@cray.com