Long Fat Pipes
High-capacity packet satellite channels are LFN’s (Delay 4 x 35‘800 km = 470ms RTT) and modern terrestrial long-haul fibre-optic paths will also fall into the LFN class. There are three fundamental performance problems with the current TCP over LFNs:
• Window Size Limit (2^16 or max 65k bytes) – Remedy: TCP option “Window scale”
• Recovery from Segment Losses – Remedy: TCP option “selective acknowledgement”
• Round-Trip Measurement – Remedy: TCP option “Time stamp” Read more…
Browsers can setup two or more TCP connections to an HTTP server to facilitate parallel downloads. As the browser parses the Web page it is aware of which objects it needs to download.
Rather than send the requests in series over a single connection, the requests are sent over parallel connections to enable faster downloading of the Web page. Another technique used by browsers to improve the performance is “HTTP pipelining”. Read more…
Normal TCP options are Type 0 (End of Option List), 1 (No-Operation), 2 (Maximum Segment Size, len 4), 3 (WSOPT – Window Scale, len 3), 4 (SACK Permitted, len 2), 5 (SACK, len N), and 8 (TSOPT – Time Stamp Option, len 10). Read more…
At a recent Riverbed Technology event in Denver, Colorado, Steve McCanne, Loris Degioanni, and Gerald Combs shared the stage and told the story of the history behind their inventions TCPDUMP, WinPcap, and Wireshark. To view the video: Read more…
Moving your applications into “the cloud” means that round-trip times and protocol and application latency can become a serious issue.
The Riverbed Virtual Steelhead Appliance, a software version of Riverbed Technology’s WDS solution is worth considering:
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Bob Gilbert discusses how Riverbed Technology RSP provides “one-box” solution for local delivery of virtualized industry-standard applications, speeding up your network:
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