Interesting Snippets from 2012-10-01

• TCP small queues [LWN.net]

  The "bufferbloat" problem is the result of excessive buffering in the network stack; it leads to long latencies and poor reliability in the network as a whole. Fixing it is a matter of buffering less data in each system between any two endpoints—a task that sounds simple, but proves to be more challenging than one might expect. It turns out that buffering can show up in many surprising places in the networking stack; tracking all of these places down and fixing them is not always easy.

• TCP Fast Open: expediting web services [LWN.net]

  Reducing the number of round trips required in a TCP conversation has thus become a subject of keen interest for companies that provide web services. It is therefore unsurprising that Google should be the originator of a series of patches to the Linux networking stack to implement the TCP Fast Open (TFO) feature, which allows the elimination of one round time trip (RTT) from certain kinds of TCP conversations. According to the implementers (in "TCP Fast Open", CoNEXT 2011 [PDF]), TFO could result in speed improvements of between 4% and 41% in the page load times on popular web sites.

• The Programmers Before Us Were Better

  To be a programmer back in the early days you really needed to know your stuff. You needed to know mathematics, electronics and countless other skills before you could even think about building anything. If a company or institution dropped giant amounts of money on this machine they barely understand, do you think they handed the keys over to some kid fresh out of school? Not to mention the fact that there were no computer science or software development colleges for quite a while. So who wrote all the software then? Ambitious geeks who were self motivated to learn the craft, and they were passionate about it.

[/snippets] permanent link