Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ncar!gatech!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Friendliness vs. Performance Message-ID: Date: 26 Aug 88 00:49:52 GMT References: <8808252337.AA28274@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 27 It's hard to make guesses as to what will sell. But aside from occasional tests in the PC-compatible area, there isn't a lot of benchmarking hysteria in the TCP/IP world. So I'd think vendors would not be under the sort of pressure to get performance at all costs that they are in some other markets. From the point of view of a manager I can tell you that I get lots of calls about inability to get mail through to distant sites, and broken telnet connections. By and large our users do not carefully time their FTP's and call me when their throughput is only 100 kbits/sec. I have conducted various reviews of Internet performance at the IETF meetings, where we asked an assemblage of network managers what problems they were seeing. Again, it's clear that everytime somebody gets a "connection broken" message, their network manager gets an irate call, but I don't see signs of irate users demanding 20% more speed. (Gross slowdowns are another thing, of course.) So if there were really a speed/robustness tradeoff, I'd strongly recommend that vendors favor robustness. But I'm not even convinced that there is. The only case I know of where using Van's recommendations would slow you down is where by not using them you manage to get more than your fair share of a gateway. It's clear that this isn't a stable situation: only one person can do this at a time, and you can't guarantee that he will be able to do it consistently. Furthermore, you're going to start seeing gateways that defend themselves against this sort of thing. This is not just a concern of us wierdos on the Internet either. There are lots of big corporate networks being built, and they typically have lots of serial lines carefully spec'ed to have no more bandwidth than necessary.