Agenda for Transport/Apps BOF

TRANSPORT/APPS JOINT BOF ON WEB-RELATED TRANSPORT ISSUES
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When: Monday, March 4, 1200-1430
Where: Los Angeles IETF
Chairs: Allison Mankin and Harald Alvestrand

This session will attempt to address the problems that the phenomenal
growth of the Web has caused, both related to the strains it puts on the
Web servers and the strain it puts on the infrastructure.

The session will start with some short introductions to illuminate
various parts of the problem and some examples of proposed solutions,
and thereafter, there will be the usual open discussion.

Examples of the problems we want to address:

- Web problems for the Web client
  - "always" goes far away
  - Takes too long
- Web problems for the Web servers
  - Thousands of connections in CLOSE_WAIT and similar states
  - Hundreds of addresses per interface
  - Nasty behaviour by clients (they crash)
- Web problems for the network
  - Congestion because TCP backoff doesn't have time to establish
  - Routing cache miss because of too many destinations at once
  - Loss of "locality of reference" model

Examples of solutions we might want to pursue:

- An extensive caching network might solve the problem.
- Deploying T/TCP might solve the problem.
- Deploying LBL reliable multicast in unicast mode rather than TCP
might solve the problem.
- Switching to HTTP/NG with multiple-stream persistent connections
might solve the problem.
- Deploying flow policing in the routers rather than the end nodes
might solve the problem.

Some of these will be presented in short introductions.

After the presentations, there will be a general discussion,
terminating in an attempt to decide on what further work, if any, we
need to do related to this problem area.

Received on Friday, 23 February 1996 13:16:28 UTC