[viraptor]

Ok, maybe I'm missing something, but reading the article I see some weird ideas:

RED is hard to deploy, so let's change the base protocol instead. - how does that make sense? Everyone would have to start using new libraries and for backward compatibility we'd have to preserve the tcp layer too. That means standards like http would have to get extensions to use SRV records or suffer delays while utp availability is probed.

There's also a complaint that RED will drop packets once the queue is full. I don't get that at all - it will always happen...

In addition I get an impression there is some tension/implied superiority between us (people doing uTP) and them (ones doing RED). Why does it look so ugly? There's a known problem, there's an interesting solution for new software (uTP) and some plan to migrate old protocols transparently (RED). When did that turn into some bizarre conflict and why?

[bramcohen]

BitTorrent is using uTP just fine, which is only, you know, most of the upload from consumer internet connections, and we're working on getting the same things crammed into TCP with LEDBAT, but that's a slow process.

I wasn't complaining about RED dropping packets, just describing how it works.

As for the tension, my point is that my solution works and the other one doesn't. If you want to know why the person I quoted was being such a dismissive jerk, you'll have to ask him.

[viraptor]

Ok, I don't understand this part then: "With RED the router will instead have some probability of dropping the packet based on the size of the queue, going up to 100% if the queue is full." - that seems to be universally true for any queue with limited capacity. If it's full, it's going to start dropping packets - whether it's those on the queue, or the new ones doesn't matter. Any queue which is full will require dropping as many packets as the number coming in.

Is there some reason this was described as a specific behaviour here?

[stock_toaster]

I believe the focus is more on the first part of that statement. A "standard" queue would only drop packets when it is in actuality full. RED drops packets when the queue is non-full based on some calculated probability. The likelihood of drop simply goes up until the queue is full (and 100% of new packets drop).

Apparently.

[moultano]

> When did that turn into some bizarre conflict and why?

Man you weren't kidding. I tried looking up uTP on wikipedia hoping to come away with some technical understanding. It's full of passive aggressive statements that cite forum posts as their support, with no information on how it actually works. Maybe some of the folks in this thread could go fix that.

[bramcohen]

There's some detailed writeups of the algorithms in the LEDBAT documentation. As for commentary, that's distinctly lacking, and my post is filling in some of the gap.