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> Every aspect of TCP’s design is wrong The driver of most of a global network of computers which has been wildly successful beyond dreams before it was real…

> Every aspect of TCP’s design is wrong The driver of most of a global network of computers which has been wildly successful beyond dreams before it was real… probably deserves a better deal than “every aspect is wrong”. It has worked fanatically well and chasing the long tail of performance improvements isn’t equivalent to determining what has gotten us here is wrong.

Spivak 4y ago
Everything about the protocol being wrong for the specific case of machines directly wired to one another over a high speed reliable network is not an admonishment of the protocol in general. And the protocol, being an abstract concept, doesn’t have feeling to hurt.
hinkley 4y ago
My Distributed Computing professor said, “now we are going to discuss why Ethernet is a terrible protocol but we use it anyway.” Like democracy, everything else we’ve tried is even worse.
teraflop 4y ago
You're cherry-picking an interpretation of a single sentence, when it should be read in the context of the preceding one: Ousterhout says every aspect of TCP's design is wrong for (modern) datacenter computing. He's not saying bad decisions were made at the time it was designed, nor even that it's badly designed for other use cases today. The first few paragraphs of the article give even more context: > The TCP transport protocol has proven to be phenomenally successful and adaptable. [...] It is an extraordinary engineering achievement to have designed a mechanism that could survive such radical changes in underlying technology. > However, datacenter computing creates unprecedented challenges for TCP. [...] The datacenter environment, with millions of cores in close proximity and individual applications harnessing thousands of machines that interact on microsecond timescales, could not have been envisioned by the designers of TCP, and TCP does not perform well in this environment
petesergeant 4y ago
"Specifically, Homa aims to replace TCP, which was designed in the era before modern data center environments existed. Consequently, TCP doesn’t take into account the unique properties of data center networks (like high-speed, high-reliability, and low-latency). Furthermore, the nature of RPC traffic is different - RPC communication in a data center often involve enormous amounts of small messages and communication between many different machines."[0] 0: https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/08/15/a-linux-kernel-implementation-of-the-homa-transport-protocol.html https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/08/15/a-linux-kernel-implem...

Spivak 4y ago

Everything about the protocol being wrong for the specific case of machines directly wired to one another over a high speed reliable network is not an admonishment of the protocol in general. And the protocol, being an abstract concept, doesn’t have feeling to hurt.

hinkley 4y ago

My Distributed Computing professor said, “now we are going to discuss why Ethernet is a terrible protocol but we use it anyway.” Like democracy, everything else we’ve tried is even worse.

teraflop 4y ago

You're cherry-picking an interpretation of a single sentence, when it should be read in the context of the preceding one: Ousterhout says every aspect of TCP's design is wrong for (modern) datacenter computing. He's not saying bad decisions were made at the time it was designed, nor even that it's badly designed for other use cases today. The first few paragraphs of the article give even more context: > The TCP transport protocol has proven to be phenomenally successful and adaptable. [...] It is an extraordinary engineering achievement to have designed a mechanism that could survive such radical changes in underlying technology. > However, datacenter computing creates unprecedented challenges for TCP. [...] The datacenter environment, with millions of cores in close proximity and individual applications harnessing thousands of machines that interact on microsecond timescales, could not have been envisioned by the designers of TCP, and TCP does not perform well in this environment

petesergeant 4y ago

"Specifically, Homa aims to replace TCP, which was designed in the era before modern data center environments existed. Consequently, TCP doesn’t take into account the unique properties of data center networks (like high-speed, high-reliability, and low-latency). Furthermore, the nature of RPC traffic is different - RPC communication in a data center often involve enormous amounts of small messages and communication between many different machines."[0] 0: https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/08/15/a-linux-kernel-implementation-of-the-homa-transport-protocol.html https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/08/15/a-linux-kernel-implem...