- From: Jeffrey Mogul <mogul@pa.dec.com>
- Date: Thu, 23 Mar 95 11:48:30 PST
- To: Adrian.Colley@sse.ie
- Cc: Dove@eworld.com, http-wg (will serve files for coffee) <http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, mogul@pa.dec.com
> 1. The mobile client requests a document from the proxy, indicating it only
> wants a single "page" (of client-specified length).
> 2. The proxy fetches the full document (or perhaps only the first page,
> depending on the version of its source)
> 3. The proxy returns the desired "page" to the client.
The mobile client can do this by specifying a small TCP receive
window and not opening it again. If you want the first 1024 bytes,
for instance, you set the TCP receive window to 1024 + the probable
length of the reply header. When you receive the reply header,
make sure the TCP window doesn't move, but will decrease to zero.
Manipulating the TCP window in this way is potentially risky, because
it can interact with the so-called "Silly-Window Syndrome Avoidance
Algorithm" to produce long delays when absolutely nothing happens for
many seconds. Presumably, on a low-bandwidth link, this is exactly
what you don't want to do!
The standard sender-side SWS-avoidance algorithm will not send less
than one TCP segment if it has ever seen a window larger than one
segment. E.g., if your segment size (MSS) is 512 bytes, the receiver
has at least once advertised a window of 1024 bytes, and has shrunk
the window to (say) 256 bytes, the sender-size SWS-avoidance algorithm
will delay transmission. In theory, this delay is supposed to be
about 200 msec (i.e., not very long), but in most BSD-derived systems,
a bug pegs this delay at about 5 seconds.
So the key to making your suggestion work is "never shrink the window
size below the MSS." (In fact, the lower limit might be 2*MSS; I
remember that this was a critical limit in some cases, but I can't
remember exactly which ones. It has to do with the standard delayed
ACK policy.) I suppose it is likely that on a low-bandwidth link, the
MSS will be set fairly small ... but it is not always possible for the
application to know/control the actual MSS. Proceed with caution.
-Jeff
Received on Thursday, 23 March 1995 12:01:32 UTC