Re: [tcpm] Is this a problem?

[Mahesh Jethanandani <[e-mail]>]

Caitlin,

Caitlin Bestler wrote:
>
> This is indeed a problem. I'm just not convinced it's a transport problem.
>
>  
>
> Only the application layer has enough information to know when a client's
>
> behavior is abusive and/or suspicious.
>
Applications if anything have less knowledge than TCP on why a 
connection is not making progress. In this particular case, HTTP could 
not make a distinction between a connection not making progress because 
of congestion in the network or because the client is advertising zero 
window. And yet all Apache can do is to reset the connection after a 
fixed amount of time. Again, HTTP may know how many of its connections 
are in the stuck state, it will not know how many FTP connections are 
seeing the same issue or how seriously constrained the system is.

We have found that a fixed timeout also does not work. It is easy to 
guess and work around as we did with our client program.

The solution has to be adaptive to the condition which in this case 
involves TCP and applications have little knowledge of the state of all 
of TCP connections.
>
> The transport layer should remain
>
> militantly ignorant of these matters.
>
When it impacts TCP's ability to function, I can hardly see that being 
ignorant will help.

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