[Bloat] Random idea in reaction to all the discussion of TCP flavours - timestamps?

[Rick Jones]

On Thu, 2011-03-17 at 04:26 +0200, Jonathan Morton wrote:

> For the benefit of the 3G folks, here are some helpful axioms to discuss:
> 
> 1) Buffering more than a couple of seconds of data (without employing
>  AQM) is unhelpful, and will actually increase network load without
>  increasing goodput.  Unless there is a compelling reason, you should
>  try to buffer less than a second.
> 
> This is because congestion and packet-loss information takes longer to
>  influence existing flows, and new flows are more difficult to start. 
>  After about 3 seconds of no information, most TCPs will start
>  retransmission - regardless of whether the packets were physically
>  lost, or are simply languishing in a multi-megabyte buffer somewhere.

So initialRTO is specced currently to be 3 seconds, with a small but
non-trivial effort under way to reduce that, but once established
connections have a minimum RTO of less than or equal to a second don't
they?

rick jones