Alex Pankratov wrote: > This pretty bold statement is largely incorrect based on my own > experience. I'm not exactly sure who you are referring to as > "p2p people", but the excessive round-trips are hardly viewed > as "frustrating" by any of networking devs I know. > > For certain types of applications, extra round trips at start are a really big deal. As an example, setting up a VoIP call to someone 1/3rd of the way around the globe. Every round trip wasted (on things like setting up a connection before even starting to exchange security information) before you can confirm that the far end is alerting is a very noticeable delay between click (or last digit dialed) and ringback. Because there are preexisting expectations about how long it takes to set up a phone call, this is even more user-annoying than extra delay between clicking "search" and getting the search results displayed.
At amicima, we were networking developers who were *very* aware of wasted round trips... we designed a secure transport protocol that takes 2 round trips to do a secured and authenticated session setup, including protection against SYN-flood type attacks, and designed in features like the ability to use data exchanged during that setup as nonce material that can be signed by higher authentication layers, rather than having to waste another half-round-trip sending the data you want signed by the other end. Similarly, we designed a NAT-traversal scheme that runs in parallel with session establishment rather than wasting many round trips on address-gathering before it starts. So there are such "p2p people" who care a whole lot about these excessive round trips, find them "frustrating", think that users will appreciate efforts taken to reduce them, and have done something about that. Matthew Kaufman ps. For those who don't know the history, the next generation of the above-mentioned protocol is now known as RTMFP and is already shipping in the beta version of Flash Player 10. _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
