On 17 Mar, 2011, at 8:22 pm, Rick Jones wrote:

>> For the benefit of the 3G folks, here are some helpful axioms to discuss:
>> 
>> 1) Buffering more than a couple of seconds of data (without employing
>> AQM) is unhelpful, and will actually increase network load without
>> increasing goodput.  Unless there is a compelling reason, you should
>> try to buffer less than a second.
>> 
>> This is because congestion and packet-loss information takes longer to
>> influence existing flows, and new flows are more difficult to start. 
>> After about 3 seconds of no information, most TCPs will start
>> retransmission - regardless of whether the packets were physically
>> lost, or are simply languishing in a multi-megabyte buffer somewhere.
> 
> So initialRTO is specced currently to be 3 seconds, with a small but
> non-trivial effort under way to reduce that, but once established
> connections have a minimum RTO of less than or equal to a second don't
> they?

If the RTT they measure is low enough, then yes.  If the queues lengthen, the 
measured RTT goes up and so does the RTO, once the connection is established.

But the *initial* RTO is the important one for unmanaged queue sizing, because 
that determines whether a new connection can be started without 
retransmissions, all else functioning correctly of course.  There is no way to 
auto-tune that.

Note also that with AQM that can re-order packets, the length of the bulk queue 
starts to matter much less, because the SYN/ACK packets can bypass most of the 
traffic.  In that case the RTT measured by the existing bulk flows will be 
higher than the latency seen by new and interactive flows.

 - Jonathan

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