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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!netnews.nwnet.net!symiserver2.symantec.com!usenet From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.networking,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: TCP latency Date: 7 Jul 1996 22:32:23 GMT Organization: Symantec Corporation Lines: 52 Message-ID: <4rpdtn$30b@symiserver2.symantec.com> References: <4paedl$4bm@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> <31D2F0C6.167EB0E7@inuxs.att.com> <4rfkje$am5@linux.cs.Helsinki.FI> <31DC8EBA.41C67EA6@dyson.iquest.net> <4rlf6i$c5f@linux.cs.Helsinki.FI> <31DEA3A3.41C67EA6@dyson.iquest.net> <Du681x.2Gy@kroete2.freinet.de> <31DFEB02.41C67EA6@dyson.iquest.net> Reply-To: tedm%toybox@agora.rdrop.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.6.34.1 X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.networking:44307 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:3960 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:23017 In <31DFEB02.41C67EA6@dyson.iquest.net>, "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net> writes: >Erik Corry wrote: >> >> John S. Dyson (toor@dyson.iquest.net) wrote: >> : Linus Torvalds wrote: >> : > In article <31DC8EBA.41C67EA6@dyson.iquest.net>, >> : > John S. Dyson <toor@dyson.iquest.net> wrote: [blah blah deleted] I have to interject something here on this discussion: I feel this has gotten so academic that it is meaningless. Who cares what the latency/throughput figures are or who is winning the current benchmark in vogue! The fact is that these numbers only become important on servers that are being used to serve users, which strikes out 90% of the personal Unix boxes out there in my opinion. Of the remainder, there are two general situations: Internal network servers (Intranet) servers used on Ethernet/Token RIng/FDDI/ 100Base connections. External network servers (Internet) servers used to serve up web pages to the Internet at large. In the second group, it is pointless to debate the issue. In these TCP connections, you are depending on optimum configuration of both ends of the connection, having great latency figures in the kernel is not going to matter because the overall network latency of the network is going to overwhelm anything else. Also, in the second group you are dealing with a server having many _simultaneous_ connections at once. The internal IP stack management is going to be much more important here. So far, I haven't read anyone's posting saying they got 50-100 simultaneous connections going and then measured latency or throughput, instead we have a couple of measurements from between _two_ workstations connected together, and people who should know better attempting to extrapolate those results to _real_ servers! The arguments here really only have meaning on servers in the first group, where the client workstation configuration, network, and server hardware is carefully controlled, and face it nobody cares that much in this market because their all more concerned with things like ease of administration. If somebody wants to do some reasearch on Linux vs BSD when 60 or more simultaneous connections are active, then it might be worth looking at, otherwise attempting to say that one's TCP stack is more efficient than the other based on 2 boxes connected together is stupid and foolish. Ted Mittelstaedt