Quoting "Arron Scott (ascott)"
QoS 101, which may help in understanding what change has occurred. ... <snip> ... So in general terms, TCP hates packet loss, as it has to cut it's rate and slow-start again. This results in what's known as the saw-tooth effect and poor performance when there are only one or two TCP sessions in play. Shaping is usually better, as this causes TCP to "adjust" it's windowing to the best possible throughput and delay is not noticable to the end-user.
Can't let this go by - TCP only uses slow start (multiplicative increase) when a session is starting. The sawtooth effect is from TCP's congestion management, i.e. when it starts to loose packets it halves its congestion window (multiplicative decsrease), then increases it again one packet per round-trip time (additive increase). Using UDP is all very well, but UDP is not congestion-aware. Games writers would do better to use newer protocols like SCTP which are designed to signal congestion to the application, allowing the game writer to do something about it, such as slowing the sending rate. Overall though I agree with Aaron: multiple queues with properties suited to whatever applications you're running is a 'best' solution, otherwise just have lots of bandwidth so as to avoid congestion. CHeers, Nevil ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Nevil Brownlee Director, Technology Development Phone: +64 9 373 7599 x88941 ITSS, The University of Auckland FAX: +64 9 373 7021 Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through University of Auckland http://www.auckland.ac.nz/