Re: RE: High Speed Firewalls

[Mikael Olsson <mikael.olsson () enternet se>]

Ryan Russell wrote:
> I think at some point, your constraining factor might get to be
> latency.  The window size can only get to be 64K, right?

Actually, no. The TCP Window Scaling option (WSOPT) defined in 
RFC 1323 can scale the window size up to 2^256 times. It was
implemented to cope with the concept of "Long Fat Networks",
meaning high throughput, high delays. 

Unfortunatelly, increasing the window size eats a hell of a 
lot of RAM on the sender end, so I don't know of many places
that actually use it, and I don't know which OSes support
it. I'd suspect a lot of *nix flavours do (atleast I keep
seeing WSOPTs in their SYN packets), and that.. uhmmm. some 
big commercial OSes don't.

$.02 and a bit OT, I know :-)

/Mike

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