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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!cbosgd!ucbvax!tcp-ip
From: tcp-ip@ucbvax.ARPA
Newsgroups: fa.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: MILNET/ARPANET performance
Message-ID: <7717@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 3-Jun-85 11:51:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.7717
Posted: Mon Jun  3 11:51:43 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 5-Jun-85 01:14:16 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.ARPA
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
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From: MILLS@USC-ISID.ARPA

In response to the message sent  Sat 1 Jun 85 22:33:56-EDT from Lixia@MIT-XX.ARPA

Lixia,

A large number of hosts have been observed here using initial retransmission
timeouts in the one-to-two second range, which has been repeatedly noted as
being too short (see RFC-889). When a couple of these WMWs gang up on a
busy gateway, instant congestion occurs and doesn't go away until the
hosts time out the ACK for their SYN, usually a minute or so. The SYNfull
gateway meanwhile is dropping lots of packets for other clients, who
themselves are ratcheting the retransmission-timeout estimate upwards.
The system is obviously unstable, even when the gateway was comfortably
underloaded to begin with. All it takes is a pulse of traffic sufficient
to topple the gateway over its buffer limit.

In other words, your argument has great merit; however the assumption that
retransmission timeouts are always longer than the roundtrip time is not
correct for many players in this circus.

Dave
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