3 ms·
It’s interesting to see a proof of the problem, but I’m more interested in how people deal with it practically.
by draw_down 8y ago
It’s interesting to see a proof of the problem, but I’m more interested in how people deal with it practically.
- dsr_ 8y agoMost of the time, people deal with this by noting that the network sometimes has problems and expecting success anyway. This is guaranteed to fail eventually, but if you can characterize the likelihood of dropping messages, you can set up agreed-upon sequences to improve the probability of eventual cooperation -- but you can never guarantee it. For example: you can put checksums or hashes on your message to help detect corruption. You can put sequence numbers on your messages to help detect message loss. You can run an isochronous stream of very short messages to help decide on a base error rate, or to increase the likelihood of detecting a major loss. You can set up N different networks and hope that they don't all have losses at the same time. All of these techniques help identify and remediate some degree of message loss, but cannot guarantee to solve it given a cantankerous enough -- or evil enough -- message killer.