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From: frg@jfcl.dec.com (Fred R. Goldstein)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: SO_KEEPALIVE considered harmful?
Message-ID: <499@jfcl.dec.com>
Date: 8 Jun 89 21:55:02 GMT
References: <8905301407.AA03344@uunet.uu.net> <8906072222.AA25735@gaak.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: frg@jfcl.nac.dec.com.UUCP (Fred R. Goldstein)
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 10

This is probably a stupid question since I'm not familiar with the way
different systems (ie BSD) implement TCP timeouts.  But wouldn't the
problem of dissimilar systems (ie, AX.25 on one end and Cray on the
other) still be solvable by basing the timeout on the smoothed round
trip time (srtt)?  If the keepalive timer were some significant multiple
of srtt (or longer, if srtt is short) then it would still scale.

Proper behavior, of course, is still open to debate -- whether the
application or TCP should do the teardown.  I'm not joining in...
       fred