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Date:      Tue, 26 Dec 1995 10:01:50 +0200
From:      Petri Helenius <pete@sms.fi>
To:        davidg@Root.COM
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org, wollman@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Unpleasant scrolling behaviour on 2.1.0 (fwd) 
Message-ID:  <199512260801.KAA27158@silver.sms.fi>
In-Reply-To: <199512260021.QAA05890@corbin.Root.COM>
References:  <199512252127.XAA26484@silver.sms.fi> <199512260021.QAA05890@corbin.Root.COM>

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David Greenman writes:

 >    The loopback MTU has been at 16K or greater since Garrett Wollman first
 > changed it to 64k back in FreeBSD 1.1. I changed it from 64K to 16K back in
 > March of this year because of some bad interaction that 64K has with the
 > socket layer. As for "stop-and-go", no, having the MTU at 16k doesn't by
 > itself cause this - especially since the window size is significantly larger
 > than that. You can use a variety of network tools to verify this.

The window size is (by default) at 16384. Just run tcpdump and you'll
soon figure this out.

 >    It should probably be lowered because of bugs in the networking code. This
 > has likely started to become a problem recently because of some bugs fixes
 > in areas that indirectly affect the Nagel algorithm. 'ttcp -t localhost' still
 > gives very good results for the 16K MTU, so it's not completely broken.

It's Nagle. 

 >    It's very presumptuous to assume that "non-networking skilled individuals"
 > were involved in this change. Quite the contrary. If you want to be helpful,
 > then I'd suggest making useful comments about what you think the MTU should be
 > changed to and why you think it should be changed. Your comments will
 > otherwise only alienante you and cause people to ignore you.
 > 
The MTU should be half or less of the default window size. I would recommend
values in the range of 5k to get effective streaming regardless of the
application and specific system scheduling load. Calculate something like
TCP_MSS < MTU < (TCP_WIN/3) and you'll be safe.

On the helpfulness side, I'd tried to raise discussion on this topic
a couple of times before, until I threw the flame above, nobody cared.

Pete



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