Subject: Re: Summary of responses so far and proposal moving forward[WasRe: [tcpm] Is this a problem?]

From: Erik Nordmark <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:10:01 -0800

David Borman wrote:

> While I agree with the document on the identification of the problem, I 
> disagree with the proposed solution (changing TCP to time out 
> connections in persist state).  Having a connection stay in persist 
> state for long periods of time (i.e., zero window probes continue to be 
> ACKed) by itself is not a bad thing.  That is how TCP was designed to 
> work.  Connections can survive through lots of adversity.  If a 
> connection is stuck because it is waiting for user action and the user 
> walked away and went home for the day, he should be able to come back 
> the next morning and do what needs to be done, and then the connection 
> will continue.

I'm of the same opinion.

As far as it comes to recommending a mitigation technique when TCP and 
the OS runs out of memory resources I think we can do better than merely 
looking at connections in persist state. As others have pointed out 
there is also the case of a connection which makes very slow progress 
(and uses up a fair bit of send buffer space). Ideally one don't want to 
penalize connections that happen to be over slow links, so some care 
would be needed.

    Erik

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