[Ecn-sane] IETF 110 quick summary

[Holland, Jake]

On 3/9/21, 12:43 AM, "Pete Heist" <pete at heistp.net> wrote:
> I'm glad to hear that. At least it adds something to your work before,
> from a different vantage point, albeit much smaller. I know that
> studies from entirely disinterested parties would be good too, but that
> might the hard part, they're disinterested! :)

Yeah, sorry I couldn't manage to re-run my scripts successfully yet.
I'm still curious to figure out if there's been any deployment motion,
but the attempts that are easy to try haven't succeeded, and I haven't
had time to refactor it to insist on an answer.  (I re-tried a few times,
hoping it was a cluster capacity issue that would sort itself out or that
it would complete if I batched the jobs smaller, but no joy.)

>> I seem to recall a thread in the wake of Apple's ECN enabling about
>> one of the Linux distros considering turning ECN on by default for
>> outbound connections, in which one of them found that it completely
>> wrecked his throughput, and so it got tabled with unfortunately
>> no pcap posted.
>>
>> Any recollection of where that was?  I was guessing it might be
>> one of the misbehaviors from the network that Apple encountered.
>
> That is odd and would be good to know about. I enabled ECN on my Linux
> laptop a long time ago and haven't noticed a problem that I'm aware of.
> I wish the distros would reconsider enabling it, unless there are
> active reasons it shouldn't be deployed, but they may now just be in a
> holding pattern on it.

There's apparently a few misbehaving boxes out there, so using ECN from
the wrong network location can leave you messed up, which I thought was
why Apple had the heuristics running to detect pathologies and respond
by turning off ECT for a while.  But it's pretty hard to pin down what's
happening (and from where) without a zillion clients running ECN from all
over the world.

Anyway, I thought I remembered Dave posting a link to that thread to one
of the lists (maybe this one?) and commenting in the thread (my vague
recollection was he was asking for a pcap but was told they had already
moved on and couldn't get one easily, or some such).

I also thought I remembered someone in that thread was maybe considering
(or maybe just suggesting) adding something like the apple heuristics,
so I was curious if anything ever happened.

-Jake