Re: Tragedy of the commons: more on multiple-connections

Thomas Maslen (tmaslen@verity.com)
Wed, 23 Nov 94 10:29:31 -0800

> The extra bandwidth for this user is coming at the expense of other
> users-thus we have a classic instance of the tragedy of the commons.

Right. This sort of thing is one of the recurring themes on the
end2end-interest list; every now and then some bright spark announces
a shiny new protocol that outperforms TCP, and is gently reminded that
if everyone used it the results would be much worse than with modern
TCP implementations.

We _really_ don't want a repeat of the meltdown that originally prompted
Van Jacobson's work on TCP congestion avoidance. FHTTP, and also the HTTP
modifications proposed and analyzed in

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/IT94/Proceedings/DDay/mogul/HTTPLatency.html

seem to be headed in the right direction; multiple parallel TCP connections,
on the other hand, are pretty disturbing.

Thomas Maslen My opinions, not Verity's
tmaslen@verity.com