I hope you wrote it for your own benefit and not mine! Traffic congestion
issues being obvious enough, your reductio is irrelevant to the case of a
single user who has issues saturating their relatively slow dsl link.
Torrent is not an option, aget is, end of story.
On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 9:42 PM, Gregory Maxwell
<gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
[snip]
But if you are running parallel connections to
avoid slowdowns you're
just attempting to cheat TCP congestion control and get an unfair
share of the available bandwidth. That kind of selfish behaviour
fuels non-neutral behaviour and ought not be encouraged.
[snip]
On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 3:06 AM, Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote:
I have no problem helping someone get a faster
download speech and I'm
also
not willing to fling around fallacies about how
selfish behavior is bad
for
society. Here is wget vs. aget for the full
history dump of the simple
[snip]
And? I did point out this is possible, and that no torrent was
required to achieve this end. Thank you for validating my point.
Since you've called my position fallacious I figure I ought to give it
a reasonable defence, although we've gone off-topic.
The use of parallel TCP has allowed you an inequitable share of the
available network capacity[1]. The parallel transport is fundamentally
less efficient as it increases the total number of congestion
drops[2]. The categorical imperative would have us not perform
activities that would be harmful if everyone undertook them. At the
limit: If everyone attempted to achieve an unequal share of capacity
by running parallel connections the internet would suffer congestion
collapse[3].
Less philosophically and more practically: the unfair usage of
capacity by parallel fetching P2P tools is a primary reason for
internet providers to engage in 'non-neutral' activities such as
blocking or throttling this P2P traffic[4][5][6]. Ironically, a
provider which treats parallel transport technologies unfairly will be
providing a more fair network service and non-neutral handling of
traffic is the only way to prevent an (arguably unfair) redistribution
of transport towards end user heavy service providers.
(I highly recommend reading the material in [5] for a simple overview
of P2P fairness and network efficiency; as well as the Briscone IETF
draft in [4] for a detailed operational perspective)
Much of the public discussion on neutrality has focused on portraying
service providers considering or engaging in non-neutral activities as
greedy and evil. The real story is far more complicated and far less
clear cut.
Where this is on-topic is that non-neutral behaviour by service
providers may well make the Wikimedia Foundation's mission more costly
to practice in the future. In my professional opinion I believe the
best defence against this sort of outcome available to organizations
like Wikimedia (and other large content houses) is the promotion of
equitable transfer mechanisms which avoid unduly burdening end user
providers and therefore providing an objective justification for
non-neutral behaviour. To this end Wikimedia should not promote or
utilize cost shifting technology (such as P2P distribution) or
inherently unfair inefficient transmission (parallel TCP; or fudged
server-side initial window) gratuitously.
I spent a fair amount of time producing what I believe to be a well
cited reply which I believe stands well enough on its own that I
should not need to post any more in support of it. I hope that you
will at least put some thought into the issues I've raised here before
dismissing this position. If my position is fallacious then numerous
academics and professionals in the industry are guilty of falling for
the same fallacies.
[1] Cho, S. 2006 Congestion Control Schemes for Single and Parallel
Tcp Flows in High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks. Doctoral Thesis.
UMI Order Number: AAI3219144., Texas A & M University.
[2] Padhye, J., Firoiu, V. Towsley, D. and Kurose, J., Modeling TCP
throughput: a simple model and its empirical validation. ACMSIGCOMM,
Sept. 1998.
[3] Floyd, S., and Fall, K., Promoting the Use of End-to-End
Congestion Control in the Internet, IEEE/ACM Transactions on
Networking, Aug. 1999.
[4] B. Briscoe, T. Moncaster, L. Burness (BT),
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-briscoe-tsvwg-relax-fairness-01
[5] Nicholas Weaver presentation "Bulk Data P2P:
Cost Shifting, not Cost Savings"
(
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/p2pi_shifting.ppt<http://www.icsi.…)t>);
Nicholas
Weaver Position Paper P2PI Workshop
http://www.funchords.com/p2pi/1
p2pi-weaver.txt <http://www.funchords.com/p2pi/1%0Ap2pi-weaver.txt>
[6] Bruno Tuffin, Patrick Maillé: How Many Parallel TCP Sessions to
Open: A Pricing Perspective. ICQT 2006: 2-12
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