Re: [tcpm] draft-minshall-nagle

[Joe Touch <[e-mail]>]

On 6/3/2014 8:15 AM, Neal Cardwell wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Joe Touch <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> Hi, Wes,
>>
>> Although I don't recall this and only scanned it briefly, I don't quite
>> understand the problem.
>>
>> I thought it was widely known that Nagle was useful for single-character
>> interactive traffic, but also widely known as something that should be
>> disabled for any multi-character interactive traffic - including
>> multi-character encodings, HTTP, etc.
>>
>> If Nagle is off - as it should be for interactive web traffic - then the
>> optimizations in this draft won't have any impact.
>>
>> So what kind of traffic does this actually help? Or is this an optimization
>> of a path that either isn't or shouldn't be used?
>
>
> The Minshall algorithm is a nice win for some workloads other than web traffic:
>
>    Application performance pitfalls and TCP's Nagle algorithm
>    http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346012

My point is that even by the time of this paper, it was well-understood 
that Nagle should not be used in these environments. The paper cites 
1999 personal communication with Jim Gettys for this, but it was 
well-known long before it was recited as an issue in this 1996 paper:
http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1997/apr97/ccr-9704-heidemann.pdf

The use case cited is quite dated - network news has been largely 
abandoned. Is there a currently relevant use case for this approach, and 
given that interactive apps already should be disabling Nagle, how much 
will it help?

Joe