Re: Raise initial congestion window size / speedup slow start?

[H.K. Jerry Chu]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 8:49 PM, Bill Fink <billfink@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Jul 2010, Hagen Paul Pfeifer wrote:
>
>> * David Miller | 2010-07-14 14:55:47 [-0700]:
>>
>> >Although section 3 of RFC 5681 is a great text, it does not say at all
>> >that increasing the initial CWND would lead to fairness issues.
>>
>> Because it is only one side of the medal, probing conservative the available
>> link capacity in conjunction with n simultaneous probing TCP/SCTP/DCCP
>> instances is another.
>>
>> >To be honest, I think google's proposal holds a lot of weight.  If
>> >over time link sizes and speeds are increasing (they are) then nudging
>> >the initial CWND every so often is a legitimate proposal.  Were
>> >someone to claim that utilization is lower than it could be because of
>> >the currenttly specified initial CWND, I would have no problem
>> >believing them.
>> >
>> >And I'm happy to make Linux use an increased value once it has
>> >traction in the standardization community.
>>
>> Currently I know no working link capacity probing approach, without active
>> network feedback, to conservatively probing the available link capacity with a
>> high CWND. I am curious about any future trends.
>
> A long, long time ago, I suggested a Path BW Discovery mechanism
> to the IETF, analogous to the Path MTU Discovery mechanism, but
> it didn't get any traction.  Such information could be extremely
> useful to TCP endpoints, to determine a maximum window size to
> use, to effectively rate limit a much stronger sender from
> overpowering a much weaker receiver (for example 10-GigE -> GigE),
> resulting in abominable performance across large RTT paths
> (as low as 12 Mbps), even in the absence of any real network
> contention.

Unfortunately that is not going to help initcwnd (unless one can invent a
PBWD protocol from just 3WHS), and the web is dominated by short-lived
connections so the small initcwnd becomes a choke point.

Jerry

>
>                                                -Bill
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