On Mar 4, 2014, at 9:12 AM, Eggert, Lars <[email protected]> wrote:
>> it looks like (in japan at least) TCP is very rarely controlled by packet 
>> loss (dupack or timeout) but more by
>> sender or receiver rate limiting (or just being too short lived:)

It would be interesting to know their delay variation. You’ve seen my famous “9 
second delay” graphic. There was no packet loss at all in that… You have also 
seen, I believe, my annotated Shepherd Diagram of an upload to Picasa. That was 
from Akasaka, and had three drops in a five second window, resulting in the 
session spending 40% of its duration underrunning available capacity.

It would be interesting to know the traffic mix, the line speeds and latencies 
end to end, and so on. From my perspective, it’s Really Hard to say “the 
internet acts this way”; consider the problem of the six blind philosophers and 
the elephant... What I think I *can* say is that I measured something in a 
certain way in a particular topological place at a particular time and with a 
particular workload, I analyzed it in a certain way, and in that measurement 
and analysis I observed ... something.

If you want my guess at what the Japanese trace measured, it had upwards of 50 
MBPS end to end and "enough" buffer at that rate in the bottleneck switch to 
prevent tail-drop loss in the ambient workload. Short sessions, which 
predominate, would not touch that, and high volume sessions might, as you say, 
self-limit in one of several ways.

For comparison, yesterday, I took 24 hours of tcpdump trace on my laptop and 
wrote a reduction script. I started out by capturing 38 hours of traces earlier 
in the week in one hour chunks, and discovered that tcpdump zero-bases its data 
structures when it switches output files. Then I took a single 24 hour trace 
file.

In that reduction, I distinguished between microflows *from* me and microflows 
*to* me (where “me” might be my IPv4 or my IPv6 address or name), which would 
be the two halves of a TCP session. I also threw out sessions that didn’t make 
sense to me, such as ones that might have already been open when I started the 
trace. Reason? I have asymmetric bandwidth (12 MBPS down and 2 MBPS up, sez the 
contract, and I think that’s interpreted as “at least”, as I have seen higher), 
and I expect the two directions to behave a little differently. 

Rates are in kilobits/second, and all numbers are for a session. I have TCP 
sessions that are as short as a single packet each way (data/RST, for whatever 
reason I might receive such things, and maybe SYN/SYN-ACK) and pipelined tcp 
connections lasting the better part of an hour (I opened all of my face:b00c 
friends’ pages, which moved quite a bit of data, all using IPv6).

my flows: 10548
my retransmissions: 4009
my packets:     min=1           median=10               95%=33          
max=73732
my bytes:       min=1           median=2493             95%=19608       
max=697486314
my durations:   min=0.002751    median=58.096561        95%=120.355108  
max=35764.656936
my kbps:        min=0.000074    median=0.577529         95%=17.171851   
max=1049048788.929813

his flows: 14977
his retransmissions: 2859
his packets:    min=1   median=9        95%=104 max=181542
his bytes:      min=1   median=3795     95%=110354      max=221579702
his durations:  min=0.000015    median=46.146412        95%=148.102106  
max=35764.620901
his kbps:       min=0.000459    median=0.928163 95%=114.575466  max=22604.513177

There are some weird questions I want to understand about the “max” fields. I 
edited out sessions that were open when I started the trace, of which there 
were a few. There are a couple of other strange sessions. One of these days I 
might sort out the difference between 14977 and 10548. But I think the bottom 
line is that while the median session in my home office probably doesn’t incur 
a loss, it looks to me like the ones at the 95th percentile for size probably 
does - and maybe several.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail

_______________________________________________
aqm mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/aqm

Reply via email to