Re: Handling Packet Misordering?

[Rick Jones <[e-mail]>]

As an asside - I suspect there may be differing definitions of what
pathological means/implies :)

> Reordering has a certain probability of triggering fast retransmit -
> if the session has four or more packets outstanding (relatively
> unusual) 

Wouldn't four or more segments outstanding on a
session/connection/flow/whatever :) being relatively unusual imply that
there would relatively little improvment (for that
session/connection/flow/whatever) from a load balancing scheme that
spreads packets of a given session/connection/flow/whatever across
multiple links?

> and drops the first, the duplicate acks resulting from its successors 

Did you mean to say "reorders the first" here since dropping the first
would (?) have the same behaviour between load-balanced and
non-load-balanced links?

> If you want to re-design fast retransmit to do so better, such as is
> done in New Reno or in SACK, I'm all for that. But I really don't
> think that the network behaviors which might eliminate reordering are
> improvements. They require the network to support additional
> complexity, which itself is prone to failures, and their cure may be
> worse than the disease.

Should we distinguish between eliminating reordering and not doing
things that may reorder as a frequent matter of course?

rick jones
-- 
Wisdom Teeth are impacted, people are affected by the effects of events.
these opinions are mine, all mine; HP might not want them anyway... :)
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