[e2e] ACK on PUSH?

[Charles M. Hannum]

On Friday 06 August 2004 12:46, Charles M. Hannum wrote:
> This is something I implemented in 1994 (and which was copied by many
> people after that) because it fixed a very nasty performance problem with
> some applications.  Later on it was decided to solve the same problem by
> instead castrating delayed ACK and forcing an immediate ACK on every other
> packet.

Actually, I want to expand on this a bit...

The performance problem this addressed persisted in some systems, including 
FreeBSD, until at least 2002.  (It may still, but I haven't tested it since 
then.)  It is the reason that MacOS X.2, for example, gets significantly 
worse throughput (sometimes as much as 10x) downloading the same data as a 
NetBSD machine sitting right next to it on the same network.