atom feed8 messages in org.freebsd.freebsd-ispRe: Enable SACK
FromSent OnAttachments
Joao PagaimeJul 12, 2000 6:51 am 
Dan NelsonJul 12, 2000 7:19 am 
Luigi RizzoJul 12, 2000 7:22 am 
Joao PagaimeJul 12, 2000 9:31 am 
Jonathan LemonJul 12, 2000 9:52 am 
James WyattJul 12, 2000 10:00 am 
Kevin ObermanJul 12, 2000 10:50 am 
Paul SaabJul 12, 2000 2:21 pm 
Subject:Re: Enable SACK
From:Kevin Oberman (ober@es.net)
Date:Jul 12, 2000 10:50:05 am
List:org.freebsd.freebsd-isp

Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 12:01:11 -0500 (CDT) From: James Wyatt <jwy@rwsystems.net> Sender: owne@FreeBSD.ORG

Ok, I'll bite. It won't be the first time I'va asked a question and learned something from this group of folks... Feel free to answer in private email or post to the list(s).

What is SACK and what is good/bad about it? I don't intend to start a flame war, but really would like to know. I think I can go read RFC1323 and get the gist of it this afternoon... TIA - Jy@

SACK is a TCP enhancement to prevent a common problems of connections oscillating in speed between line rate and near zero when several packets are lost in a single transmission window. It is NOT part of RFC1323 which covers a number of other enhancements in TCP to enhance performance over very high speed links. It is covered in RFC2018, "TCP Selective Acknowledgment Options", and is a standards track RFC.

I'm quite surprised to hear that FreeBSD does not support it as this is a serious problem on large latency links at OC-3 and above. It's a really big issue at higher speeds. When we did "fat pipe" testing over an OC-12 from Berkeley, CA to Chicago, IL, we had to enable SACK along with the 1323 stuff on the Suns that were used in the test to get over 300 Mbps on a single TCP stream. I hate to think that Sun does TCP better than FreeBSD. (Compaq, IBM, and Sun all do SACK.)

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message