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Best TCP/IP Stack Implementation?
paultantk asks: "This mailing list suggests that the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack is sub-par. It was the best in the 90's, but not anymore. So the question is, which operating system now holds the title for the best TCP/IP stack implementation?"
That's easy. Windows.
mmm..mmmmm..mmmmMMHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Damn...couldn't keep a straight face. ^_^
Seriously, though, if FreeBSD is no longer king of the mountain, my vote would have to go with NetBSD (it's always been the BSDs, hasn't it?), although the term "best" is rather open-ended, and subject to serious variations of interpretation. Perhaps before we set about answering this question, we ought to decide just what we mean by "best".
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
From TFA:
Required for full three month are US$18,900 (15,600 or CHF24,000)
26. July 2005: Pair Networks, pledged US$14,000 Thank you very much!
Go Pair Networks!
Otherwise known as Aurora.
C:\>
....zzzzzz*klunk* OW!
I wonder if it's possible to sue Slashdot for posting an article summary so mind-numbingly dull that it caused some readers to fall asleep and hit their head on their desk...
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
Anybody know of a tird party TCPIP.SYS for Windows XP?
Also the http://www.lvllord.de/ patch should be mentioned here. Does anybody have any information on how information for patches like this one (i.e. how to know that TCPIP.SYS was the file to patch and where to patch it) is acquired?
I don't see how the linked document suggests the stack is sub-par. All it says is that the guy wants money to fund optimization, like PHK's done before.
If the page started with "OMG Linux is fastar than us!" then, yes. But I don't see how you reached your conclusions based on this material.
you have to put things in context
security ? - OpenBSD / NetBSD / Linux
performance ? - MS Windows 2003 / Linux / FreeBSD
(windows has been showen to support very nice acceleration card NAPI on linux has been showen 2.6 kernel slower than 2.4 at the recent kernel summit and freeBSD is still up there on exsisting hardware the rewrite is about supporting new models )
Portability ? NetBSD / Linux / OpenBSD
context is everything
regards
John Jones
AmiTCP or Miami.
Nothing like paying for your tcp/ip stack, 15 years after the company who made your computer went out of business.
Video Production Support
From TFA:Hope this helps.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
To compare, $6300 is roughly how much a person living on SSI disability in the U.S has to live on in a year. What really reeks is that in many areas in the U.S. many disabled people have an education of Associates Degrees or better but can't get the support they need to work or even find a job. Then sometimes there are no jobs in the area and there's no way to move or figure out where to move to.
Agreed, I don't read that post to say that described the stack as "sub par".
I did notice something interesting. If you look through the sponsorships he received, a significant amount ($14,000) was pledged was by Pair Networks. They are one of the larger hosting providers in the U.S. and hundreds FreeBSD servers at their data center in Pittsburgh. It is unlikely that they would grant 14 stacks of high society at something they did not research and find to be of direct benefit. I am not an employee of Pair, but I have been a customer for seven years.
By the way, Pair's Mirrors are quite handy.
In the good old days before OpenTransport and well before OSX, we had MacTCP. It was just fantastic.
Ignorance is the Agent of Fear; Fear Is the Agent of Violence - >1
- "my OS is better than yours, so therefore my stack is better".
- "I've got this obscure stack for my old/obsolete/obscure machine, so it r0x!"
- Linux, of course!
- OS X, of course!
etc..I'd be interested in seeing WHY a stack is better, and this means real data or stories like performance numbers or efficiency observations, etc.
On the other hand, machines built since 1998 have been fast enough and stacks have probably been optimized enough that we don't even notice anymore. For example, it was huge when Solaris 2.5.1 was replaced by Solaris 2.6; the stack was reworked because of "we're the dot in dot.com" web serving duties in 1997. However, those days people were still running SPARCstation 5/10/20's for their webs (read: 40MHz CPUs) and it made a difference. Today, your 500MHz+ CPUs don't really hiccup that much from stack inefficiencies. Sure, slashdot the darn box and you'll see some numbers, but the sites that are regularly hosting that kind of traffic are probably running heavier-duty machines.
My rant, anyway :-)
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Solaris 10's new stack is supposed to be the new top dog of the TCP/IP world.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
I want to know what he's spending that much money on.
antipaucity
All the transmission throughput speed records are held by NetBSD. Hence, it should be fairly obvious which TCP/IP stack is the best. :) Okay, maybe not the best, but definitely the fastest.
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp
For details on the network stack improvements, start here:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/networkperf/
The linux network stack sure ain't it. Anytime I run a connection-hungry p2p program, particularly the edonkey type, it munches so much network resources everything else starts failing to establish connections. Damn nuisance!
But they could always just change the name to Agamemnon. Aside from which, I don't think Colgate-Palmolive will be concerned unless the AJAX folks get into the dishwashing business.
No, seriously. Vista apparently has a completely rewritten network stack that's supposed to build on the work done with Windows Server 2003 (offloading work to network hardware, primarily) and was designed for IPv6 from the ground up.
How'd this guy get modded troll? I'm pretty damn sure it was a joke not a troll. :P
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
Yeah, the whole point is that Windows uses the BSD TCP/IP stack, so it's obviously not better. Hahaha. If you don't know what your talking about, don't mod.
Since the TCP/IP stack is only as good as the operating system it's attached to, why don't we come right out and determine, once and for all, the best operating system ever created? I think this will be a grand, insightful discussion, completely devoid of flames.
rooooar
Trumpet Winsock
Solaris 10!
It is simply the best when it comes to low latency servers with lots of clients.
I used it with 50000 sockets on a single processor opteron server with absolutely stunning performance.
But maybe the fact that NetBSD twice made the Internet2 land speed record holds for something, handling ~6GBit/s from host to host on a production network. See link to more data.
There are also a number of products which use the NetBSD stack: Sony PSP (other link), Avocent KVM-over-IP switches, QNX uses NetBSD's IP stack, there are several switches sold by IBM and HP that use NetBSD, many network access points and smaller routers, etc.
See the BSDrouter homepage for more data.
Dunno if that makes the stack good, but at least it seems to get used.
- Hubert
With the uIP stack. As long as best is defined as: small with a BSD licence :)
The other
anonymous cowards gives flying fart. or takes. whatever, he's a coward, hiding behind anonymity. it's not 3 million country. you have your "facts" wrong, stupid.
Also consider the duty cycle, if your PC is sending out packets all in one go then maybe some of them get dropped by the router even though the avereage kb/s is without the bounds of your link.
I came across a project a while ago that sent thernet pause frames in between (which the router should drop) in order to space out the data to avoid overrunning the router buffer.
I wish I could remember what it was.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
You know what's strange about this, just about a year ago there was an article on Slashdot titled, "What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack". Now, the same guy who made that presentation is asking for money to overhaul it. I don't get it. What's more, didn't it turn out that quite a bit of the performance boost they achieved was due to code that Jeffrey Hsu had written for DragonFly BSD. Maybe DragonFly has the best network stack. They're definitely doing a lot of cool stuff.
Without a doubt, DragonFlyBSD has the best TCP/IP stack. It already has all the RFC improvements that Andre wants to add. It has a correct working SACK implementation. DragonFlyBSD is a more stable faster version of FreeBSD. Why would anyone want to pay money to do what's already in DragonFlyBSD? I would encourage any FreeBSD user to just upgrade to DragonFlyBSD.
Cisco. Duh.
To me the best network stack is one that can handle many simultaneous open sockets without problems. Performance is of secondary importance after robustness. I understand a stack will at least stall out when it tries to do more than the hardware can support, but it should pick right back up where it left off when sufficient resources are available again.
I love Linux, and I've standardized on it as my platform of choice, but I have run into some problems with 2.4's network stack when >1000 sockets were simultaneously open and active, problems that don't go away until the system is rebooted. I've devised workarounds, but I'd rather not.
I still need to stress-test 2.6 .. been putting it off because I don't trust early minor-revision releases, they tend to be buggy. But from what I've read it's about ready for consideration.
But is there something better? What is the most scalable, reliable TCP/IP stack out there? Is there something that will let me open 10,000 sockets and hammer at them all at once without coming apart like wet tissue paper?
Since I'm going to be stress-testing 2.6, I'll probably do FreeBSD and Solaris10 at the same time. Does anyone have other contenders to suggest? Not necessarily something that screams like a mofo on one socket or five, but rather something that will never, ever misbehave.
-- TTK
In a talk at NZNOG earlier this year a guy from WAND in New Zealand produced some fascinating numbers comparing the various TCP/IP stacks:
5% Random Loss
Goodput(kb/s) OS
213.98 Linux 2.6.10
207.42 Linux 2.4.27
176.20 FreeBSD 5.3
162.81 FreeBSD 5.2.1
137.31 Windows XP SP2
117.98 OpenBSD
Page 13 of http://www.nznog.org/slides/wand.pdf Page 14 also has a nice graph.
I live in Saskatoon, Canada.
For me, it's roughly (monthly):
Rent: 300$
Car payment: 0 (I buy cars for 1,000$ in cash transactions).
Gas during the winter: 180$ (-40C means I drive everywhere)
Gas during the summer: 50$ (I bike, only driving to get groceries and misc items).
Car insurance: 50$
Internet and utils: 150$
Phone: 50$ (cell phone, no landline)
Food: 120$
A bus pass is about 60$/month. The insurance is a fixed, base cost on a car, while the gas is usage based. This means my transportation is 200$/month in winter, or about 100$/month in summer. OTOH, I get to go where I want, when I want, with no nasty people along for the ride. It takes about 1/3rd the time to get there, and the biking helps keep me in shape.
Saskatoon is only ~300,000 people, though. I can cross the city on bike or car in 30 minutes.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The fundamental stupidity of this topic is the burried premise that you can go around and change your IP stack like a flavour of ice-cream. FreeBSD has *never* had a bad TCP/IP stack as far back as I know the history.
The vast majority of what makes a great carbureted engine carries forward for the transition to fuel injection: precision tolerances, metalurgy, balance, lubricant flow, etc. But until the combustion chamber is reworked for fuel injection, it won't impress anyone. In case anyone hasn't figured it out, we're talking about the dying gasp of the lamentable Pentium IV: let's run it at 20,000 rpm with a second radiator behind the trunk, then we won't have to fix anything else.
Lately, FreeBSD confesses their engine has become a little cluttered with fancy new pollution controls. Along with tweaking the fuel injectors, they are making quick work of cleaning up the superficial clutter at the same time.
In the decade between 1985 and 1995 one of the great battles in the software development industry was against the instinct of every software team to roll up their sleeves and "write it again".
This is the same idiot warmed over. No respect for fifteen years of engineering tradition, or instinct for what portion of that tradition carries forward, or the degree of difficulty involved. Would trade his Porsche for a Hyundai if some Porsche design engineer confessed some minor aspect of their technology was a little long in the tooth. But he knows how to press submit on slashdot, so he's all set in the life skills dept. Oh, brave new world that has such people in it.
Honestly I was hoping to hear slashdotter's opinions on what is the best currently from different angles. But looks like you guys took it the wrong way.
All the ones I worked with at my last contract ran Linux.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
My experience has been that when people make less than the given cost of living in their area, they live a similar lifestyle, but without any type of insurance, are also forced to drive illegally because it's costly to keep a cheap car up to spec.
When I first moved out of my parent's house, I moved in with two twentysomething women sharing a one-bedroom basement apartment for $500/month, they needed a third person so they could keep their (shared) car running.
I'm long gone, but one of the girls I was living with got sick (she was a brittle diabetic) and went to the hospital, she came out with a $1200 dollar bill for some diagnostics and $75 worth of insulin, that was a year and a half ago and she's still paying it off.
That being said, I did manage to live on about $350 one December when hours got really short at my work. It was a very cold, very hungry month.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I figure that I spend about $125/month on gasoline, and I drive the smallest car I could afford (a Ford Focus).
Gas costs about $2.40/gallon here now, and I've got an eleven-gallon tank that gets thirsty about once a week, sometimes more.
It's not the gas that gets you though, at least in my area. I pay $125/mo for the car itself, $125/mo on gas, $80/mo on maintainance (aggregated), and a whopping $240 for insurance. The sad thing is that I pay more than twice what anyone else I've met does for the insurance, and I've NEVER been in an accident, not even a fender-bender. I guess they figure I'm a ticking timebomb since I'm a twenty-three year-old male.
A friend of mine who has never been able to drive recently had a car given to her. I had to talk her out of registering and using it. I showed her how it would cost her at least $300/mo if she was going to use it legally here in Massachusetts.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
People continue to move here faster than the homebuilders are building new housing. There's absolutely no end in sight for that trend.
Funny, because during the great depression people were moving into California quite rapidly too, and it wasn't considered an economic boon.
I think you'll find that if interest rates go up because foreign investors stop buying dollars, a lot of people aren't going to be able to afford their mortgages anymore. When your neighbors can't afford their mortgages and new ones are being issued at 14%, the selling prices will rapidly depreciate, and the vale of YOUR house is based on the recent sale prices for houses in your neighborhood.
Beware, there's something really wrong in this country when it comes to home prices. I think it has to do with the ease of borrowing. Banks are bending over backwards trying to lend people money because they KNOW it's a winning proposition and that people are willing to take it.
In my area, you have to make four times the median household income to buy a house now, and it's getting worse every day. Everyone thinks they'll retire by selling off their homes, but nobody's going to be able to afford them unless the prices normalize.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails