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From: root@TOPAZ.RUTGERS.EDU (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  Ethernet Terminal Concentrators
Message-ID: <8705060815.AA01928@topaz.rutgers.edu>
Date: Wed, 6-May-87 04:15:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.8705060815.AA01928
Posted: Wed May  6 04:15:08 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 9-May-87 02:02:44 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
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I just took a look at some statistics from three of our Cisco terminal
servers.  Since it's 3am, packet rates wouldn't show much, but I have
some other data which is probably in the long run more useful.  This
shows the total number of packets in and out for each session, the
total number of bytes, and the number of packets with data.  By
looking at the fraction of packets with data, you can get a feeling
for how much you are paying for TCP ack and window updates.  Note
however that even with LAT, there surely has to be some sort of
acknowledgements, so it can't be 100% efficient either.  The original
data contains a lot more info about the innards of the TCP protocol
handling, but I have omitted it as it didn't seem relevant to this
discussion.  It looks like well over half (typically over 2/3) of the
packets received have data (i.e. are not just acks), and the amount of
data per packet is fairly high.  It looks like around half, or maybe
slightly less of the packets sent have data, and as you would expect
it is about one char per packet.  (A couple of the connections have
been idle for long periods, so you see packets that aren't doing
much.)  It looks to me like this is about as efficient as one can hope
for.  It looks like acks for stuff we send typically gets piggybacked
on the echo, but the stuff that comes back requires separate acks.
This is what you'd expect with a simple model of what is going on, and
is presumably going to be the same for any protocol that is designed
to use unreliable networks.  The number of characters per packet also
seems good.  Obviously I can't compare this with LAT without seeing
data on LAT, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of room for
improvement.

dialup to Sun (4.2 IP, 4.3 beta TCP), though one gateway
Rcvd: 4694 (out of order: 0), with data: 4374, total data bytes: 160181
Sent: 6456 (retransmit: 1), with data: 3988, total data bytes: 4220

dialup to Pyramid (4.3 TCP/IP, with telnetd in the kernel)
Rcvd: 1981 (out of order: 0), with data: 1634, total data bytes: 119314
Sent: 1626 (retransmit: 0), with data: 824, total data bytes: 900

hardwired to Sun, through one gateway
Rcvd: 2472 (out of order: 0), with data: 1265, total data bytes: 114771
Sent: 2489 (retransmit: 0), with data: 175, total data bytes: 191

hardwired to Pyramid
Rcvd: 12195 (out of order: 0), with data: 7116, total data bytes: 88935
Sent: 9044 (retransmit: 0), with data: 6957, total data bytes: 7206

hardwired to Sun, through one gateway
Rcvd: 671 (out of order: 0), with data: 406, total data bytes: 10684
Sent: 834 (retransmit: 0), with data: 340, total data bytes: 349

hardwired to DEC-20
Rcvd: 14579 (out of order: 0), with data: 410, total data bytes: 54371
Sent: 492 (retransmit: 0), with data: 207, total data bytes: 249