[e2e] Question the other way round:

[Neil Davies]

Jon

My real world experience is that not only is it not planned, it isn't even costed

Neil

On 22 Nov 2013, at 16:06, Jon Crowcroft <Jon.Crowcroft at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> actually, tcp does precisely that (in the absence of smart virtual queues +
> ecn) and the deployment of DCTCP in data centers (which puts ECN and
> virtual quees, and modifies the congestion window evolution of TCP) is
> precisely because incast (and other problems in big data center
> computations) are not rare events, but are caused by applications' traffic
> patterns almost pathologically...
> 
> yes, we would like to design networks to make such things rare and a lot of
> the topology and capacity planning in networks tries to do this, but a) the
> evolution of applications is faster than even the best laid(*)
> update/upgrade plans of the best data center and intranet planners (and
> that was the POINT of making the internet an open platform for fast
> innovation) and b) the internet-at-large is not planned - its an evolved
> thing of a wibbly wobbly organic kind (cue 50th anniversary dr who music)
> 
> having spent the last couple of years staring at a few real-world data
> center traffic traces, I wonder if they aren't also unplanned (slightly
> pregnant pause)....after all "azure" == blue sky right ? :-)
> 
> cheers
> jon
> to paraphrase spike milligna, "a plan so cunningly laid that no matter
> where you stood, it got under your feet"
> 
> 
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 4:21 PM, <dpreed at reed.com> wrote:
> 
>> (please forward, Joe, if this is OK)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> We don't actually cause congestion to discover the rate, Jon.  Typically,
>> we try to build networks that have adequate capacity (factors of 10 or 100
>> are needed for things like the "Mother's Day" effect, or 9/11-scale
>> community need to spread and filter news quickly.)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> We encounter congestion rarely - and we fix it by building in "factors of
>> safety" in every portion of an underlying network.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Only Ph.D. theses spend an enormous amount of effort on the totally
>> congested "corner cases".  It's like a little puzzle that is easy to state,
>> easy to solve, and makes the solver work hard.  It's kind of like a "rite
>> of passage", so that is good, I guess.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> But if you are building a datacenter (AWS) or an access network or a
>> transport network, you build for the worst case, and expect it to happen
>> rarely.  The systems that depend on the network to actually work for
>> people's needs never want a congested network, and don't actually want the
>> network to operate at its local minimum cost/bit/sec.  They want the
>> network to never be in the way, and the cost they really care about is the
>> cost of getting congested for the wrong reasons.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Thursday, November 21, 2013 2:29am, "Jon Crowcroft" <
>> Jon.Crowcroft at cl.cam.ac.uk> said:
>> 
>>> i think we're mixing up two discussions here
>>> 
>>> 1. congestion was the original cause of the cwnd mech in tcp, BUT the
>>> rate adaption using feedback as a way to distributed resource
>>> allocation is the solution of the optimisation problem of net + user
>>> addressed by several researchers (kelly/voice et al, also folks at
>>> caltech) - these aren't the same thing - they got conflated in
>>> protocols in practice because we couldn't get ECN out there completely
>>> (yet) - ECN (when implemented with some decent queue (see 3 below) can
>>> be part of an efficient decentralised rate allocation
>>> 
>>> congestion is bad - avoiding it is good
>>> 
>>> distributed rate allocation for flows
>>> that have increasing utility for higher rate transfer
>>> is also good (actually its betterer:)
>>> 
>>> 2. for flows that have an a priori known rate, distributed rate
>>> allocation is a daft idea, a priori - so some sort of admission
>>> control for the flow seems better (but you can do probe/measurement
>>> based admission control if you like, and are allergic to complex
>>> signaling protocols)
>>> 
>>> 3. orthogonal to both 1&2 is policing and fairness - flow state means you
>>> can do somewhat better in fairness for 1 (e.g. do fair queus, a la
>>> keshav), and a lot better for policing for 2...
>>> 
>>> but then we've been round the best effort, integrated service,
>>> differentated service, core stateless fair queue, probe based
>>> admission control, ecn, pcn loop about 6 times since this list
>>> existed:)
>>> 
>>> yes, to detlef's original point, causing congestion (and buffer
>>> overrun) to find out the rate is a bit of a sad story...
>>> 
>>> In missive <528CFE15.7070808 at isi.edu>, Joe Touch typed:
>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 11/19/2013 7:14 PM, Ted Faber wrote:
>>>>>> On 11/19/2013 10:15, Joe Touch wrote:
>>>>>>> On 11/19/2013 10:09 AM, Dave Crocker wrote:
>>>>>>>> Given the complete generality of the question that was
>>> asked, is there
>>>>>>>> something fundamentally deficient in the answer in:
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> 
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_control#Congestion_control
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> ?
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> In particular, I think it's opening sentence is quite
>>> reasonable.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I agree, but it jumps in assuming packets. Given packets, it's
>>> easy to
>>>>>>> assume that oversubscription is the natural consequence of
>>> avoiding
>>>>>>> congestion.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Unless someone's edited it, you should read the first sentence
>>> again. I
>>>>>> see:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Congestion control concerns controlling traffic entry into a
>>>>>>> telecommunications network, so as to avoid congestive collapse
>>> by
>>>>>>> attempting to avoid oversubscription of any of the processing or
>>> link
>>>>>>> capabilities of the intermediate nodes and networks and taking
>>> resource
>>>>>>> reducing steps, such as reducing the rate of sending packets.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I read the reference to packets as an example.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Me too.
>>>>> 
>>>>> But circuits don't have a collapse or oversubscription. They simply
>>>>> reject calls that aren't compatible with available capacity.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I'm not disagreeing with the definition; I'm disagreeing with the
>>>>> assumption that having a network implies congestion and thus the need
>>>>> for congestion control.
>>>>> 
>>>>> There are a variety of mechanisms that avoid congestion, typically by
>>>>> a-priori reservation (circuits), or by limiting resource use implicitly
>>>>> (e.g., ischemic control). These are a kind of proactive control that
>>>>> avoid congestion in the first place.
>>>>> 
>>>>> That's not to say whether these mechanisms are scalable or efficient
>>>>> compared to the resource sharing afforded by packet multiplexing.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Joe
>>> 
>>> cheers
>>> 
>>> jon
>>> 
>>> 
>>