


Best TCP/IP Stack Implementation? 151
paultantk asks: "This mailing list suggests that the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack is sub-par. It was the best in the 90's, but not anymore. So the question is, which operating system now holds the title for the best TCP/IP stack implementation?"
Best TCP-IP Stack? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's easy. Windows.
mmm..mmmmm..mmmmMMHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Damn...couldn't keep a straight face. ^_^
Seriously, though, if FreeBSD is no longer king of the mountain, my vote would have to go with NetBSD (it's always been the BSDs, hasn't it?), although the term "best" is rather open-ended, and subject to serious variations of interpretation. Perhaps before we set about answering this question, we ought to decide just what we mean by "best".
Re:Best TCP-IP Stack? (Score:3, Funny)
'Ain't holdin' nuthin' back!
IP brick...
HOUSE!
IP brick...
HOUSE!
Re:Best TCP-IP Stack? (Score:2)
I'd even argue that Google Maps and re-established the internet as we know it. Now that rich, cross platform web-apps are a reality, the web is once again rife for the taking, further cementing IP in long term existence - even if it's eventually IPv6 (or IPv9 or whatever if you're in China).
Re:Best TCP-IP Stack? (Score:1)
I don't think Homer will be pleased either (Score:1)
Re:I don't think Homer will be pleased either (Score:1)
Re:Best TCP-IP Stack? (Score:2)
I mean it's only a map, and it's not like everyone is on the go all the time to places they don't know directions to. I know its a cool little web application , but come on.
Re:Best TCP-IP Stack? (Score:2)
Probably because they are americans. This [google.com] is a map showing Oslo (the capital of Norway), and surrounding areas. Note the complete lack of any roads, names, or any useful information at all. If you zoom out, you will find out that google knows that Norway is a country, but it doesn't even know the name of our capital.
Well, back to http://finn.no/kart/ [finn.no] for me...
Re:Best TCP-IP Stack? (Score:2)
Re:Best TCP-IP Stack? (Score:2)
It's a good web app alright, but still an infant in terms of substance for some of us.
On the plus note, I was able to zoom right down onto a relatives house in Vancouver,BC,CA. So you have to
anonymous cowards (Score:1)
Re:Best TCP-IP Stack? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Best TCP-IP Stack? (Score:2)
What the fuck?!!
And the whole Internet thing, isn't it enough of a purpose?
WOW at target raising! (Score:2, Insightful)
Required for full three month are US$18,900 (15,600 or CHF24,000)
26. July 2005: Pair Networks, pledged US$14,000 Thank you very much!
Go Pair Networks!
Re:WOW at target raising! (Score:1)
Re:WOW at target raising! (Score:4, Informative)
So I say GO PAIR NETWORKS!
OS/2 Warp Server for E-Business (Score:2)
The answer is... (Score:2)
I wonder if it's possible to sue Slashdot for posting an article summary so mind-numbingly dull that it caused some readers to fall asleep and hit their head on their desk...
Third party TCPIP.SYS? (Score:1)
Also the http://www.lvllord.de/ [lvllord.de] patch should be mentioned here. Does anybody have any information on how information for patches like this one (i.e. how to know that TCPIP.SYS was the file to patch and where to patch it) is acquired?
Re:Third party TCPIP.SYS? (Score:2)
Ooooh! Mystery conclusions! (Score:3, Insightful)
If the page started with "OMG Linux is fastar than us!" then, yes. But I don't see how you reached your conclusions based on this material.
Re:Ooooh! Mystery conclusions! (Score:2)
From TFA: Hope this helps.
same idiot warmed over (Score:2)
The vast majority of what makes a great carbureted engine carries forward for the transition to fuel injection: precision tolerances, metalurgy, balance, lubricant flow, etc. But until the combustion chamber is reworked for fuel injection, it won't impress anyone. In case anyone hasn't figur
Re:Ooooh! Mystery conclusions! (Score:5, Informative)
I did notice something interesting. If you look through the sponsorships he received, a significant amount ($14,000) was pledged was by Pair Networks [pair.com]. They are one of the larger hosting providers in the U.S. and hundreds FreeBSD servers at their data center in Pittsburgh. It is unlikely that they would grant 14 stacks of high society at something they did not research and find to be of direct benefit. I am not an employee of Pair, but I have been a customer for seven years.
By the way, Pair's Mirrors [pair.com] are quite handy.
In the context of what ? (Score:5, Informative)
security ? - OpenBSD / NetBSD / Linux
performance ? - MS Windows 2003 / Linux / FreeBSD
(windows has been showen to support very nice acceleration card NAPI on linux has been showen 2.6 kernel slower than 2.4 at the recent kernel summit and freeBSD is still up there on exsisting hardware the rewrite is about supporting new models )
Portability ? NetBSD / Linux / OpenBSD
context is everything
regards
John Jones
Re:In the context of what ? (Score:2)
Re:In the context of what ? (Score:2)
Re:In the context of what ? (Score:2)
Looks like we have a winner.
Amiga (Score:2)
Nothing like paying for your tcp/ip stack, 15 years after the company who made your computer went out of business.
Re:Amiga (Score:2)
Living on that much? Wow... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Living on that much? Wow... (Score:2)
In other news, an Associates Degree doesn't qualify you to wipe butt for tips.
And that $6300 a year? That's alot better than the previous $0, and of course they could have opted for disability insurance before they were disabled (assuming they weren't defective at birth).
that's easy! it's MacTCP! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:that's easy! it's MacTCP! (Score:2)
Winsock.
Dubs and Spinners Edition.
Biatch.
Re:that's easy! it's MacTCP! (Score:2)
Re:that's easy! it's MacTCP! (Score:2)
Actually, that is not quite correct. The calculation along those lines is:
With a dotted decimal notation IP address of a.b.c.d:
(a * 16,777,216) + (b * 65,563) + (c * 256) + d = decimal IP address.
As you could imagine, with an IP address being a 32bit binary number, 2^32-1 is 4,294,967,295 and 255.255.255.255 equals (255 * 16,777,216) + (255 * 65,563) + (255 * 256) + 255 = 4,294,967,295.
Your calculation incorrectly comes out to 261,120 and does not consider the correct significance of each individu
Re:that's easy! it's MacTCP! (Score:2)
I was failing to enter every equals when I tested it.
I thought to do this easily in C I would simply have to read the 32bit number four bytes at a time?
Re:that's easy! it's MacTCP! (Score:2)
Thankfully, bc seems to adhere to PEMDAS so I don't have to use parentheses.
Battle of the Stacks (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be interested in seeing WHY a stack is better, and this means real data or stories like performance numbers or efficiency observations, etc.
On the other hand, machines built since 1998 have been fast enough and stacks have probably been optimized enough that we don't even notice anymore. For example, it was huge when Solaris 2.5.1 was replaced by Solaris 2.6; the stack was reworked because of "we're the dot in dot.com" web serving duties in 1997. However, those days people were still running SPARCstation 5/10/20's for their webs (read: 40MHz CPUs) and it made a difference. Today, your 500MHz+ CPUs don't really hiccup that much from stack inefficiencies. Sure, slashdot the darn box and you'll see some numbers, but the sites that are regularly hosting that kind of traffic are probably running heavier-duty machines.
My rant, anyway :-)
Re:Battle of the Stacks (Score:3, Interesting)
I know for a fact that IBM looked into all available Linux compatible TCP/IP stacks in 2001 and found them incredibly defficient (including among its many flaws having to shift every byte sent du to improper word alignment!!). They went about rewriting the whole thing. I don't know if the mods were ever made public, though.
Re:Battle of the Stacks (Score:2)
People's expectations have risen as well -- if you read a kernel mailing list, you'll see people posting things like "My machine has 5 gigabit ethernet cards installed and I can't saturate all the links simultaneously while routing the packets and encrypting them! OMG!!!"
Re:Battle of the Stacks (Score:2)
Its still vapor at this point but (Score:3, Interesting)
No it's not... you can download it now (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp [sun.com]
For details on the network stack improvements, start here:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/networkperf/ [sun.com]
Re:Its still vapor at this point but (Score:2)
Compared to what? Solaris 9. Somewhere between Solaris 8 and 9 the TCP/IP stack suffered a 30% performance hit on the same hardware compared to Solaris 7. I have no data for Solaris 10, but hopefully they have fixed something.
$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:1, Offtopic)
I want to know what he's spending that much money on.
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
When you start making good money, its harder to live on less. When I was in college, I lived on a total of about $300/mo including rent, food, booze and entertainment. Now... its probably closer to $3000/mo for my wife and I.
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
Holy god, man -- what are you spending it on, and where? I live a -very- comfortable life on $1800/month, living in an apartment in Boston. I don't drive a BMW or go out to eat every day, but I could pare that down by about 50% if I wasn't paying student loans.
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
No, they grow to match your lifestyle. If you're living comfortably on $1000/mo and get a new job making $2000/mo, your utility companies don't magically find out and start charging you more. Your car payment or insurance premium doesn't automatically go up. Your taxes do, but that's it. If you don't make any changes to your lifestyle, you are not paying more in expenses. In fact, with the extra money you can pay off debts sooner, which means you'll be paying less interes
On living 'below' the cost of living (Score:2)
When I first moved out of my parent's house, I moved in with two twentysomething women sharing a one-bedroom basement apartment for $500/month, they needed a third person so they could keep their (shared) car running.
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:1)
High (est) Estimate
Rent: $1500
Car Payment: $600 (or two @ $300)
Car Insurance: $300
Gasoline: $250 (SUV)
Utilities: $200
Broad(band): $50
Food: $800 (eat out more)
Entertainment: $500
Student Loans: $200
Total: $4400
High(er) Estimate
Rent: $1200
Car Payment: $300 (nothing expensive)
Car Insurance: $100
Gasoline: $100
Utilities: $200
Broad(band): $50
Food: $400
Entertainment: $250
Total: $2600
Low Estimate:
Rent: $600
Car Payment: $0 (it's paid off)
Gasoline: $100
Utilities: $150
Broad(ban
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
I've never driven a car, so I don't really know, but I always thought public transportation was "more expensive" than driving. I pay $75 a month (in Chicago), but people in the suburbs can pay nearly $200 a month on train fare alone. Does this end up being cheaper than gas?
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
Do people really pay $100 a month for gasoline?
Easily. With a 36-mile commute (1-way), 30MPG car, and gas at $2.30/gal, that's $110/month just for getting to and from work. Add in after-work and weekend driving, and there's $150. Of course most people have shorter commutes so $100 is probably a closer total for a month.
I think public transit is often less expensive than owning a car (buying the car, gas, insurance, taxes, maintainence) but it gives you a lot more flexibility. Here (Boston), the train
Here is my situation. (Score:2)
For me, it's roughly (monthly):
Rent: 300$
Car payment: 0 (I buy cars for 1,000$ in cash transactions).
Gas during the winter: 180$ (-40C means I drive everywhere)
Gas during the summer: 50$ (I bike, only driving to get groceries and misc items).
Car insurance: 50$
Internet and utils: 150$
Phone: 50$ (cell phone, no landline)
Food: 120$
A bus pass is about 60$/month. The insurance is a fixed, base cost on a car, while the gas is usage based. This means my transportation is 200$/month i
Re:Here is my situation. (Score:2)
Rent: $325
Food: $150ish (I usually try to eat well)
Car/Gas costs: $0
Internet: $20
I live across the street from the university. Work there in the summer, study there in the fall, winter and spring. I mooch off my next door neighbour for rides to go get food, since he usually needs to get food too...
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
(Actually, it's closer to 5*$40/month).
Car Costs (Score:2)
Gas costs about $2.40/gallon here now, and I've got an eleven-gallon tank that gets thirsty about once a week, sometimes more.
It's not the gas that gets you though, at least in my area. I pay $125/mo for the car itself, $125/mo on gas, $80/mo on maintainance (aggregated), and a whopping $240 for insurance. The sad thing is
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
Two car payments (36mo): $600
Food: $450
Gas: $250
Misc: $400
We really don't live a lavish lifestyle... no fancy furniture or plasma TVs. We've paid off the student loans and have no credit card debt.
The house is by far the biggest expense. We have a nice house, but it was owned by old folks and needs alot maintenance.
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
$750 - rent
$100 - utilities (aggregated and averaged)
$125 - car payment
$250 - car insurance payment (WTF Massachusetts!)
$125 - gasoline!
$200 - retirement fund contribution
$75 - data services (broadband, vonage, etc.)
$50 - health/dental insurance contribution
---
$1675 - total so far
I haven't even included a bunch of other little things, these are all my 'mostly inflexible' costs. Bear in mind that in those numbers I haven't had anything to
Absolutely no end in sight... (Score:2)
Funny, because during the great depression people were moving into California quite rapidly too, and it wasn't considered an economic boon.
I think you'll find that if interest rates go up because foreign investors stop buying dollars, a lot of people aren't going to be able to afford their mortgages anymo
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
Mortgage with Taxes and insurence for me is 1000 a month.
Home maintenance is about 100 a month
2 cars I am paying 600 a month
GAS and Maintenance about 100 a month.
Food about 200 a month
Things like clothing etc are around 50 a month
So all in all that is a little over 2000 a month for me. Luckally My house is a 3 family appartment so I get rent for the other 2 units. So that essenctilly cuts my mortgage to 100 a month. But still many of these bills are paying off dept.
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
Whatever. When I (voluntarily) left my six-figure/year tech job to enlist in the Army National Guard and return to college, I took a paycut that left me with exactly 10% of my previos pay.
Yes, it was a bit of a shock but I got along just fine. In fact, I was happier than I'd ever been. No, I couldn't drive a shiny new car any longer, nor could I live in a swank 2-bedroom condo but I have enough money to get by and pay my bills.
Now that I'm out of college, I live in $2000 take-home/month and pay $800/mont
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
I could quit my job, move into a crappy apartment in the ghetto, sell my car to drive a '91 Civic and get a job at Starbucks or whatever.
But why? The work I do is worth alot to my employer, we have a 15 year home loan and modest late model cars. I'd like to keep my kids out of public school and live debt free. What's wrong with that?
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
Outside of places like New York City, San Francisco, Miami and some of the surrounding areas, I can't think of any where in the US where 50% of my income goes to federal state and local taxes (at the $6300/mo number, at least). Sure, if I'm in a top-tier income level I might be paying 40% to state and federal (and in Yonkers of NYC an additional city income tax), but even $6300/mo gross doesn't push me to that point.
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
You can deduct property taxes from your income taxes, of course, but it adds up. A 3bed/1bath in Nassau County, NY often pays around $16,000 in taxes. Outside of the NYC area, a typical 3bed/1.5bath house in a decent neighborhood of a distressed upstate city like Schenectady pays $4,000-$5,000 (on an assessed value of ~$65,000).
I'm not even factoring in sales & excise taxes, which are very sign
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
You are joking, aren't you? Aren't you? Good God, man; that's insane. I pay $2500 on ~$195,000 and thought I was getting ripped off. My father-in-law lives in Buffalo, NY, and is always going on about all the "free" services that he gets from the gov'ment like trash pickup. I have to pay to have my trash hauled, but since I guess I'm saving about $1
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
In the 50's it had a population of about 120,000 the main General Electric plant, GE Corporate HQ and a railroad locomotive factory. GE alone employed 50,000, mostly skilled tradesmen. Today GE Power Systems is barely running with about 2,500 folks.
I live in a suburb of Albany, and my school & property taxes are just under $5,000/yr. I pay for garbage and water too.
Why so high?
States like NY have high taxes because of numerous and
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
Re:$6300 Us per month?!?!? (Score:2)
On the other hand, my GF recently switched jobs from Germany to Switzerland because the pay (for about 15% more work) is more than double, and the taxes are lower. And the bureucracy is less.
NetBSD still holds all the records (Score:3, Insightful)
Wierdness with TCP/IP on Linux (Score:2)
Re:Wierdness with TCP/IP on Linux (Score:2)
Which version of the kernel? 2.4? 2.6?
I've had this behavior before, but it turned out to be the D-Link firewall/router in front of the box dropping the connections. Windows XP wouldn't push the router hard enough, but a very similar program on Linux would.
When W32/Nachi came out, this was a common problem under Windows, as it would push these little routers to the point that TCP connections would routinely time out. Anyone who's DSL mysteriously "stopped working" (when it
Re:Wierdness with TCP/IP on Linux (Score:2)
Could well be the router - I have an ethernet based router in front of my ADSL. I don't think it's so simple as connections piling up, though, for 2 reasons. First, I often do other stuff that could be expected to pile them up (eg: usiong "linky" extension in firefox to open 50 webcomics in tabs all at once), and this doesn't exhibit the same problem. Second, I try to turn down the settings (connections at once, connections per time, bandwid
Re:Wierdness with TCP/IP on Linux (Score:2)
Asymmetrical being the important part. When you are uploading you can't download and vice-versa. The switching between these two modes is unnoticeable at low usage, but as it increases your connection will start to crawl. This is especially noticeable on a system where you download a ton of files and then ssh into a remote system. you'd notice a big lag on the ssh connection...
Re:Wierdness with TCP/IP on Linux (Score:1)
Re:Wierdness with TCP/IP on Linux (Score:2)
If you're saturating your upstream, you can't efficiently ACK your downloads -- which kills throughput. It's not an issue until you
Re:Wierdness with TCP/IP on Linux (Score:2)
duty cycle (Score:2)
I came across a project a while ago that sent thernet pause frames in between (which the router should drop) in order to space out the data to avoid overrunning the router buffer.
I wish I could remember what it was.
Sam
Re:Wierdness with TCP/IP on Linux (Score:2)
Re:Wierdness with TCP/IP on Linux (Score:2)
I had this very same problem until I replaced my Netgear MR814 with a Linksys WRT54G.
Re:Wierdness with TCP/IP on Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Your downstream bandwidth is limited by your upstream bandwidth in corner cases - TCP/IP rate limiting works based on the time between ACKs. If your P2P program is using up all of your upstream bandwidth, then you may find that everything else is failing. Try throttling your P2P app to 80% or so of your available bandwidth, and see if that makes a difference. Also, consider using OpenBSD's ALTQ framework (now ported to FreeBSD and NetBSD)
Re:Wierdness with TCP/IP on Linux (Score:2)
Windows Vista? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Windows Vista? (Score:2)
Best OS? (Score:3, Funny)
NetBSD usage examples, hardware & software (Score:3, Interesting)
But maybe the fact that NetBSD twice made the Internet2 land speed record holds for something, handling ~6GBit/s from host to host on a production network. See link to more data [feyrer.de].
There are also a number of products which use the NetBSD stack: Sony PSP [feyrer.de] (other link) [feyrer.de], Avocent KVM-over-IP switches [netbsd.org], QNX uses NetBSD's IP stack [feyrer.de], there are several switches sold by IBM and HP that use NetBSD [feyrer.de], many network access points and smaller routers, etc.
See the BSDrouter [bsdrouter.org] homepage for more data.
Dunno if that makes the stack good, but at least it seems to get used.
- Hubert
Maybe some Avocents. (Score:2)
Contiki (Score:1)
DragonFlyBSD version of FreeBSD (Score:3, Interesting)
Best TCP/IP Stack? (Score:2)
Cisco. Duh.
Re:Best TCP/IP Stack? (Score:2)
[/sarcasm]
Reliable TCP/IP stack? (Score:3, Informative)
To me the best network stack is one that can handle many simultaneous open sockets without problems. Performance is of secondary importance after robustness. I understand a stack will at least stall out when it tries to do more than the hardware can support, but it should pick right back up where it left off when sufficient resources are available again.
I love Linux, and I've standardized on it as my platform of choice, but I have run into some problems with 2.4's network stack when >1000 sockets were simultaneously open and active, problems that don't go away until the system is rebooted. I've devised workarounds, but I'd rather not.
I still need to stress-test 2.6 .. been putting it off because I don't trust early minor-revision releases, they tend to be buggy. But from what I've read it's about ready for consideration.
But is there something better? What is the most scalable, reliable TCP/IP stack out there? Is there something that will let me open 10,000 sockets and hammer at them all at once without coming apart like wet tissue paper?
Since I'm going to be stress-testing 2.6, I'll probably do FreeBSD and Solaris10 at the same time. Does anyone have other contenders to suggest? Not necessarily something that screams like a mofo on one socket or five, but rather something that will never, ever misbehave.
-- TTK
Re:Reliable TCP/IP stack? (Score:2)
Thank you. I've been using select(), and will give epoll() a try (which appears to be available only under 2.6.x).
-- TTK
Re: Reliable TCP/IP stack? (Score:2)
The symptoms are weird select() failures (falsely indicating that socket fd's have data available for reading), connect() failures, and spontaneously dropped connections. I have been able to reliably replicate these problems with a program which simply forks off 32 child processes and enters a select()/read()/accept() loop, while each child process opens several SOCK_STREAM connections to the parent and writes data to them as select() indicates the connections are available for writing.
The perl source is
Re:Well duh (Score:1)
Re:Gotta be... (Score:2)
Re:Some actual numbers (Score:2)