Re: [quicwg/base-drafts] Should kPersistentCongestionThreshold be 1 or 2? (#2556)

[Jana Iyengar <[e-mail]>]

*facepalm* @ianswett, of course. (Also, FWIW, PR #2557 makes this a simple multiplier, so let's just use that language.)

So I think I may have the opposite concern to @pravb. The mechanisms we are talking about are subtly different, so let's just talk about behavior instead of the mechanisms.

TCP RTO uses a minRTO while PTO does not. As a result, in the common case, persistent congestion for TCP will be declared at minRTO (or later). We risk declaring persistent congestion too soon with QUIC, even with 3 PTOs, since minRTO is at least 200ms for TCP, AFAIK. QUIC might be too aggressive in declaring persistent congestion.

This might be actually bad for performance. Anecdotally, I remember that Yuchung had tried turning on [RTO Restart](https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/85/materials/slides-85-tcpm-2) and found that it increased spurious RTOs.  While spurious PTOs are not bad in QUIC, we don't yet have a way to detect spuriously declared persistent congestion.

This makes me wonder if we should use a min value for declaring persistent congestion. I think this is justifiable as based on best current practice that we know in TCP and that declaring congestion too soon might hurt throughput. (Note that a min is still unnecessary for QUIC PTO because spurious PTOs have only minor bandwidth cost.)

As a strawman, I'll propose that we set the persistent congestion time period to max(PTO, 200ms).

Why PTO and not 3 * PTO? Because I believe (and someone can prove me wrong) that TCP actually does use a single RTO period for declaring an RTO, despite potentially sending TLPs in that time period.
>From the RACK draft, my understanding is that sending TLPs in TCP does not actually change the RTO timer, which runs for the same amount of time (from the last ack received in practice or the earliest outstanding data).

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