IRC Net Bandwidth (was IRC and Security)
Chris Torek
torek at elf.ee.lbl.gov
Thu Mar 21 06:45:21 AEST 1991
>brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>>But it's the packets that cost. A 2-byte packet costs almost as much as
>>a 500-byte packet.
In article <703 at seqp4.UUCP> jdarcy at seqp4.ORG (Jeffrey D'Arcy) writes:
>Yeah, right. On an Ethernet, you have ....
Two points are important here:
Most wide-area links are not Ethernet (so you cannot calculate
packet lengths using Ethernet particulars);
and:
Much of the Internet within the continental USA (and probably
also outside it, but I do not know) uses truly horrid IP
forwarding implementations. The NSS routers, for instance,
have (or had; probably this has been fixed by now) such long
code paths that they could not keep up with T1 (1.44 Mb/s)
links.
The huge latency introduced by existing Internet routers really does make
small packets almost as expensive as large ones.
This is entirely curable (and in software, no less).
--
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Lawrence Berkeley Lab CSE/EE (+1 415 486 5427)
Berkeley, CA Domain: torek at ee.lbl.gov
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