Re: Question on flow control for a single file transfer

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Amos Jeffries <squid3@treenet.co.nz> wrote:

> On 2013-11-05 05:05, Peter Lepeska wrote:
>
>> Amos,
>>
>> I agree what you said, but again only when there is more than one active
>> stream. Again, HTTP 2 flow control is harmless at best when there is only
>> one active stream.
>>
>
> Part of my point was that there is absolutely no way to determine that one
> active stream cases existence all the way along the path. Middleware exists
> (whether it is visible to the endpoints or not) and the "single stream" may
> be sharing any HTTP hop with one or more other streams.
>
> "At best" this single stream will be able to avoid contention in the more
> common cases where it ceases being a single end-to-end stream at some
> middel hop. So no I think the best-case is rather better than you are
> saying.


The sender knows if there are other active streams at the time it has data
to send.


>
>
>
>
>> But you don't have to believe me. Just setup a test a browser that does
>> flow control and add a few % loss and 200 ms latency and see whether you
>> are able to download large files faster with flow control on or off. The
>> flow control off case should never lose, assuming the loss/latency are
>> regular and your test is long enough.
>>
>
> At what size data frames? and what relative size of TCP and HTTP layer
> buffer sizes? over how many hops?
>
> In the grand scheme of HTTP, single client going to single server, with a
> single stream and nothing in between is a rather rare occurance. Just like
> it is a rather rare and artificial occurance to see only a single isolated
> TCP connection today.


Those questions will not impact your results. When there is available
buffering at the TCP layer, HTTP flow control makes one of two decisions --
send now or send later. When flow control is disabled the answer is always
send now. Therefore no HTTP flow control will always be as fast or faster.

Actually, I don't know for sure but I'd bet the single stream case is the
most common from an overall bytes sent perspective due to http streaming
movies from services like Netflix. In any case, there are many uses of HTTP
that involve one at a time file transfers.

Peter

>
>
> Amos
>
>
>