In message <34145CA3.60D9@cup.hp.com>, Rick Jones writes:
> In regards to all the simulations and suggestions and such, I have a
> question.
>
> How many systems on the Internet today strictly adhere to the IW=1?
>
> I ask because I wonder if we are already gaining operational experience
> with the Internet proper with an IW that is effectively 2.
>
> >From everything I have heard, it sounds like the strict adherents are
> mostly Solaris 2.something systems. From the dust-up over the IW between
> Win95/NT and Solaris, I gather that Win95/NT have an effective IW of 2.
>
> I know that HP-UX has an effective IW of 2, and I would guess (with no
> hard data) that most other commercial Unix offerings have that as well
> or we would have also heard of performance interoperability issues
> between Win95/NT and those Unixes. I'll not hazard a guess for FreeBSD
> and Linux.
There are no interoperability issues if one end does IW=1 and the
other IW=2.
> I guess a followup question would be what proportion of the "Internet
> traffic mass" is comprised of "ants" (Win95 et al) versus "mamals" (the
> Unixes).
>
> rick jones
A more important question is what percentage of high volume web
servers implement IW=1. BSD variants account for a high percentage
mostly *becasue they perform well*, but also because the PC BSD
varients (BSDI, FreeBSD, etc) are very cost effective (IW=1). Solaris
and other SysV based Unix (like HP/UX) are also widely used despite
not performing as well (IW=2). NT is less popular as a web server
since performance is worse yet but still significant due to religious
convictions of some (IW=2?). For web servers on a WAN performance is
largely a matter of the quality of the TCP implementation. It seems
like a fairly even split.
It doesn't really matter whether the clients (Win95) implement IW>1.
Some TCPs out there don't bother with slow start at all. The fact
that that hasn't yet completely killed the Internet is no reason to
declare this a good practice. Same with IW>1.
Curtis
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Sep 19 2000 - 11:51:49 EDT