Re: Comparing an old flow snapshot with some packet size data

[Curtis Villamizar <curtis () ans net>]

In message <2.2.32.19960806173812.00711b8c () mail cts com>, "Kent W. England" wri
tes:
> NANOG Folks;
[ ... 
> Now, is there more data to bolster or refute these conclusions? I've done
> what I can with what I've found, but there just isn't much data to go on
> anymore. But I think it is pretty consistent with the view that a lot of the
> traffic is WWW TCP sessions of a few kilobytes. Would you agree? Would path
> MTU discovery help or could we all just informally set the Internet default
> MTU up to 1500 bytes [as John Hawkinson suggested on big-internet] and
> suffer a few fragmented slow speed links. Are most PPP MTUs set at the
> default 1500 or no?
>
> --Kent


Hi there Kent,

Persistant connections is a prominant feature of HTTP 1.1, now in
draft.  Maybe someone who follows that WG can comment on its progress.
If on average there are 2-3 inline images per page (reasonable
estimate IMO, though I have no data to back this up), then the average
transfer size will increase.  I've heard (verbal at NANOG) that
Netscape has promised to support persistant connections, with the only
caveat that they will open one connection for the page itself and
another for all the inlines so they can start rendering the first
inline while a long page is being read.  They can probably avoid this
for short pages.  This could lead to a significant improvement in the
ability of the Internet traffic to respond to low levels of packet
drop and make good use of TCP congestion control, plus it will
significantly improve the speed of transfer on uncongested paths where
currently TCP never gets out of the initial slow start.

Curtis

ps- If this isn't too off topic, does anyone know what servers and
clients (if any) currently support persistant connections?
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