[e2e] Re: Bursty traffic and TCP flows (was: TOEs and related issues)

[RJ Atkinson]

On Mar 09, 2004, at 11:50, Marko Zec wrote:
> I must admit I was silly enough once upon the time when I was employed
> by IBM as a field engineer, until Cisco cashed out IBM to shut down its
> networking business back in autumn 1999. All of the IBM's IP routers at
> that time were built in such a silly way that their buffers were
> measured / limited in terms of number of packets. I guess there are
> still some silly MIT people on this list who designed precisely those
> IBM (ex. Proteon) routers, so perhaps we could hear a comment or two on
> those silly design decisions from the first hand.

Ah, so one product has a particular design strategy, therefore
all products of that type must use that same design strategy.  Whew.
Thanks for enlightening me.  I erroneously thought that different
folks might make different design choices (good, bad, or sideways).

> Furthermore, I guess
> most of the today's Cisco routers are also suffering from the similar
> silly (mis)design problem...

It would be interesting to hear from someone with first-hand knowledge
of what cisco's design(s) look(s) like today, so we could work with
data rather than with speculation.

> Regarding the other statement that implies on how unusual it must be 
> for
> a TCP flow to build up a queue on a bottleneck link / router, I'd
> rather not comment...

I didn't imply any such thing; I just noted that the chain of 
assumptions
had gotten pretty long -- without much validation that the assumptions
were generally true today.  An invalid premise is generally unlikely
to lead to a valid conclusion, so it is helpful to know whether or not
those premises are likely to be valid.

Ran