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Date:      Tue, 28 Jan 1997 22:39:08 -0500
From:      "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM>
To:        dg@root.com
Cc:        Petri Helenius <pete@sms.fi>, hal@vailsys.com, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: best mtu for lo0? 
Message-ID:  <199701290339.WAA00536@whizzo.transsys.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 28 Jan 1997 11:36:05 PST." <199701281936.LAA16507@root.com> 
References:  <199701281936.LAA16507@root.com> 

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> > > Petri Helenius <pete@sms.fi> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > What's your lo0 MTU? If it's the 16384 that some
> > > > non-tcp-knowledgeable person put in sometime in the past 
> > > > I think what you are seeing is called "TCP deadlock" which appears when
> > > > window size is equal or smaller than the MTU. This makes TCP to be
> ...
> > > Is this correct?  I notice 2.1.6-R sets MTU for lo0 to 16384.  Should
> > > this be reduced to 1500?  Will it affect performance of aliased IP
> > > addresses, for which a static route through lo0 is usually specified?
> >
> >Want me to comment on this (I'm not on the hackers list any longer
> >though)?
> >
> >The above still stands true that if you set your TCPWIN < MTU you'll
> >experience TCP 'deadlock' which ends up being of horrible performance.
> 
>    Pete is likely correct that window < MTU is a problem (that's obvious,
> right?), but he's wrong that this is occuring in recent versions of FreeBSD.
> The send/receive windows are set to 3*MTU, and for lo0 this is 49152 bytes.

Even on other systems which don't have this optimization, what's the big
harm in running stop-and-wait on the loopback interface?  It's not as if
there are queues in the networks which you can fill and signficant
propagation delays.   I don't recall exactly how the queuing is done
these days and how ipintr() is invoked, but I'll bet that before the
loopback output function returns, there's a software interrupt invoked to
process the packet just queued up for ip_input()...

louie





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