[Bloat] [iccrg] Musings on the future of Internet Congestion Control

[Sebastian Moeller]

Hi David,


> On Jul 12, 2022, at 21:22, David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 12 Jul 2022, Sebastian Moeller wrote:
> 
>> Hi David,
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>>> On Jul 12, 2022, at 19:56, David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Tue, 12 Jul 2022, Sebastian Moeller via Bloat wrote:
>>> 
>>>>>>> There are plenty of useful things that they can do and yes, I personally think they’re the way of the future - but **not** in their current form, where they must “lie” to TCP, cause ossification,
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 	[SM] Here I happily agree, if we can get the nagative side-effects removed that would be great, however is that actually feasible or just desirable?
>>>>>>> etc. PEPs have never been considered as part of the congestion control design - when they came on the scene, in the IETF, they were despised for breaking the architecture, and then all the trouble with how they need to play tricks was discovered (spoofing IP addresses, making assumptions about header fields, and whatnot). That doesn’t mean that a very different kind of PEP - one which is authenticated and speaks an agreed-upon protocol - couldn’t be a good solution.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 	[SM] Again, I agree it could in theory especially if well-architected.
>>>>> That’s what I’m advocating.
>>>> 
>>>> 	[SM] Well, can you give an example of an existing well-architected PEP as proof of principle?
>>> 
>>> the windows protocols work very poorly over high latency links (i.e. long distance links) and the PEPs that short circuit those protocols make life much nicer for users as well as reducing network traffic.
>> 
>> 	[SM] Windows protocols, like in microsoft's server message block (smb) protocol or as in "protocols using data windows", like TCP's congestion and receive window?
> 
> microsoft windows smb

	[SM2] Thanks!


> 
>>> it's a nasty protocol to start with, but it's the reality on the ground and proxies do help a lot.
>> 
>> 	[SM] Are such proxies located in third party middle boxes/proxies or are these part of microsoft's software suite for enterprises (assuming the first as answer to my question)?
> 
> third party middle boxes that you put in each office as a proxy.
> 
> David Lang


[SM2] Interesting, I had actually noted that accessing files via my work VPN is a pain (in both windows and macos, as the servers use SMB). My work around was to use microsofts remote desktop (which on my access link feels reasonably snappy) to do most work remotely and also offers to transfer files, so I did all the heavy processing remotely and only exchanged either initial input or final output files, essentially working around the fact that SMB is less than impressive once the RTT goes into the milliseconds range... (However I wonder, with a filesystem essentially being a general purpose database designed for arbitrarily large blobs, how much of that issue is inherent to the problem and how much avoidable pain did microsoft add when designing their protocol?)

Kind Regards
	Sebastian