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TCP Sucks

snell-pym.org.uk

11–20 of 64 posts

Re: TCP Sucks

#11
post #4

How can there be so much TCP bashing, without a mention of SCTP. I mean at least that's implemented in some BSDs with ports available for other OSes.

Sadly the state of the internet means that only TCP and UDP will be widely used for the foreseeable future. There are a quantity of old routers which just throw away protocols they don't know, and they don't know much. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_ossification

Re: TCP Sucks

#12
Let's start with the fact that TCP obviously has problems. People who wrote the protocol did not expect for it to live that long. At the time the life expectancy of any standard was pretty short.

But... before you get too caught up with bashing... if I were you I would spend just a tiny bit trying to really understand why we are in this situation.

It might be because it is "just enough" to build upon.

You are free to use bare UDP or even bare IP for your application if you are masochist or have spare budget to allocate for fun NIH projects.

For some reason none of these projects get traction.

Re: TCP Sucks

#13
post #6

TCP pretty obviously doesn’t suck as it’s pretty much powered the internet for the last 30ish (maybe more) years. I’m sure it isn’t perfect for every purpose and maybe I can be improved but enough with the click bait.

Complaining about the article’s title is no substitute for replying to the article’s content. Writing a provocative title is how you get people to read your article. If you have an opinion to share, you shouldn’t try to disguise it as a drab technical report. The article makes sound points and the title makes sense.

Compare “TCP Sucks” (easy to read—communicates, concisely, that this is an opinion piece, and what the opinion is)

or “Limitations of TCP” (misrepresents the article as informational)

Re: TCP Sucks

#14
post #4

How can there be so much TCP bashing, without a mention of SCTP. I mean at least that's implemented in some BSDs with ports available for other OSes.

[deleted]

Re: TCP Sucks

#15
post #12

Let's start with the fact that TCP obviously has problems. People who wrote the protocol did not expect for it to live that long. At the time the life expectancy of any standard was pretty short. But... before you get too caught up with bashing... if I were you I would spend just a tiny bit trying to really understand why we are in this situation. It might be because it is "just enough" to build upon. You are free to…

Depends on what you mean by “traction”. You and I may sit at home with our gigabit internet connections and think that the limitations of TCP are a minor annoyance at best. However, at the internet factories, where internet is made, in large data centers spanning the globe, TCP’s flow control translates directly to poor utilization of expensive, high-bandwidth links between different data centers. The problem gets worse as the links get bigger. The utilization left on the table is easily enough to pay for the salaries of a few world-class network engineers and kernel programmers.

As an analogy, consider high power factor power supplies. Nobody is gonna care, at home, what the power factor of their PSUs are. However, a poor power factor at a large scale (electrical grid) translates to millions of dollars of unused current capacity. The money left on the table was so large that PFC is everywhere these days. The same thing will happen with TCP's replacement. Just give it time.

Re: TCP Sucks

#16
post #6

TCP pretty obviously doesn’t suck as it’s pretty much powered the internet for the last 30ish (maybe more) years. I’m sure it isn’t perfect for every purpose and maybe I can be improved but enough with the click bait.

Coal power obviously doesn't suck as its pretty much powered the planet for the last 100 years.

It's perfectly possible for something to both be incredibly popular and to suck. An appeal to popularity is certainly not better than a click-bait headline.

I'd argue that most of the stuff we use sucks in some ways as well; suck isn't an absolute term. TCP sucks in very specific ways the article talks about.

Re: TCP Sucks

#17
This is a really weird article. It's dated today but seems to contain information from 2010 or so.

Re: TCP Sucks

#18
I am a networking novice but the fact that my networking book (TCP/IP illustrated) has one chapter on UDP and several on TCP speaks (literal) volumes.

My entirely uninformed opinion is that if its possible to do everything TCP does over UDP we should do so just based on the fact that it is a simpler protocol. This means that broadly speaking I think the QUIC protocol is an improvement. (Whether or not its worth implementing the change I have no opinion on.)

Obviously this is a very naive understanding and I welcome others telling me where my simple model breaks down. Understandably the complexity is not removed and is only pushed up the protocol stack but I would argue that the higher complexity belongs at the application layer rather than the transport layer.

Re: TCP Sucks

#19
post #4

How can there be so much TCP bashing, without a mention of SCTP. I mean at least that's implemented in some BSDs with ports available for other OSes.

Sadly the state of the internet means that only TCP and UDP will be widely used for the foreseeable future. There are a quantity of old routers which just throw away protocols they don't know, and they don't know much. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_ossification

SCTP is deployed more widely than you think, all mobile network(3G/LTE/5G) use SCTP for varies signaling protocols like S1-MME

Re: TCP Sucks

#20
post #12

Let's start with the fact that TCP obviously has problems. People who wrote the protocol did not expect for it to live that long. At the time the life expectancy of any standard was pretty short. But... before you get too caught up with bashing... if I were you I would spend just a tiny bit trying to really understand why we are in this situation. It might be because it is "just enough" to build upon. You are free to…

Depends on what you mean by “traction”. You and I may sit at home with our gigabit internet connections and think that the limitations of TCP are a minor annoyance at best. However, at the internet factories, where internet is made, in large data centers spanning the globe, TCP’s flow control translates directly to poor utilization of expensive, high-bandwidth links between different data centers. The problem gets wo…

That, again, is static view.

Game-theory view is that any organization that would like to push this would have to spend enormous amount of resources to reinvent almost anything that has anything to do with TCP. Remember, it is implemented in hardware in many different types of devices, stacks, applications, it permeates almost anything. The application I am working on right now which has lived for over a decade and will live for another has TCP artifacts all over it. Who's going to want to fix it when it gains maybe a tiny bit of additional performance?

There aren't very many applications that have TCP as their single biggest performance problem with best ROI. Almost every is integrated with bunch more other applications over TCP causing chicken-egg problem.

Maybe Google could do that? IDK. They would maybe do it after they have reinvented almost everything else in their DC infrastructure.

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