Re: Questions about Internet Packet Losses

["Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb () clark net>]

Tony,

Thanks for posting some useful raw data.  A clarification -- in some
messages, you say you've stripped headers, but is unclear if you did so in
your top 10 table.

If so, 41 sounds reasonable for noncompressed-header Telnet, with the 44,
52, 48, 56, etc., sizes, as a guess, to a rounded-up transmission buffer.
44 in implementation where memory is allocated/managed in 4 byte quanta, 52
in 8 byte quanta, etc.

Silly question, at 5AM...MSS is one of those acronyms I use for its own
convenience and beauty, without really stopping to think what it stands
for...Mean Segment Size?
> Unanswered questions for further research:
> 1) What in hell is sending so many 40 byte packets?  Are we really seeing
>   productive ACKs?  Or is it just HTTP bogosity?  This really sucks.
> 2) What OS is using a 512 MSS?  256?
> 3) What are the minimal revs of various BSD flavors to exceed the 576 MTU
>   by default?
> 4) 41 bytes is pretty obviously interactive traffic.  Is the intuition
>   correct?  What's so special about 44, 52, 48 and 56?  What do people do
>   with 4, 8, 12 and 16 bytes of data?  And why not any of the odd values?
>
> Tony
>
>               Tony's Top 10
> Packet Size    Percentage
> 40             44.838          "ACKs, SYNs, FINs, RSTs "
> 552            9.19            512 MSS
> 1500           6.839           Happy boxes
> 576            5.779           BSD bogosity
> 44             4.719           ??
> 52             1.175           ??
> 48             0.884           ??
> 41             0.776           ??
> 56             0.73            ??
> 296            0.717           256 MSS



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