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#256947 - 25/05/2005 11:56 Congestion Management on Routers
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
We've got a problem at work: one of our products is saturating a client's routers. Now, our product is supposed to back-off, and only use 40% of the available bandwidth, but instead of doing proper congestion management, the client's router appears to simply drop the packets on the floor. This causes us to issue retries, thus effectively doubling the load.

So, my question: does anyone know anything about congestion management? A list of terms I should be googling for would be a help.

We think they're using Cisco kit, so anything specific to that would be a great help, too.
_________________________
-- roger

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#256948 - 25/05/2005 12:54 Re: Congestion Management on Routers [Re: Roger]
jmwking
old hand

Registered: 27/02/2003
Posts: 777
Loc: Washington, DC metro
I've heard very good things about Packeteer's packet shaping/throughput management products, though I haven't actually used them.

We almost got one, though...

-jk

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#256949 - 25/05/2005 13:10 Re: Congestion Management on Routers [Re: Roger]
andy
carpal tunnel

Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
Is this over TCP, UDP or something else ?
_________________________
Remind me to change my signature to something more interesting someday

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#256950 - 25/05/2005 19:11 Re: Congestion Management on Routers [Re: Roger]
wfaulk
carpal tunnel

Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
I think you're interested in RSVP.
_________________________
Bitt Faulk

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#256951 - 26/05/2005 07:44 Re: Congestion Management on Routers [Re: andy]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
Quote:
Is this over TCP, UDP or something else ?


TCP. Our customer's got a T3 from their data centre, running to a router that is connected to a bunch of 384Kbps lines. The combined bandwidth of the 384Kbps lines exceeds 45Mbps.

We've got an application that runs at the other end of each of those 384Kbps lines. It's supposed to conserve bandwidth by monitoring how quickly its (SMB) requests are being serviced -- it uses this to get an idea of the available bandwidth and then backs off to only using a percentage of this.

However, their router is dropping packets, and not telling anybody about it, which means that the retry (I think) traffic is saturating the link, and our application isn't getting a realistic measure of the available bandwidth, which means it's not backing off properly.

So, I just wanted some terms to search for, so that I could get some general information about how these things should work.
_________________________
-- roger

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#256952 - 26/05/2005 11:05 Re: Congestion Management on Routers [Re: Roger]
jmwking
old hand

Registered: 27/02/2003
Posts: 777
Loc: Washington, DC metro
Quote:
TCP. Our customer's got a T3 from their data centre, running to a router that is connected to a bunch of 384Kbps lines. The combined bandwidth of the 384Kbps lines exceeds 45Mbps.

This is exactly what the Packeteer product is designed to handle.

-jk

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#256953 - 30/05/2005 16:25 Re: Congestion Management on Routers [Re: Roger]
matthew_k
pooh-bah

Registered: 12/02/2002
Posts: 2298
Loc: Berkeley, California
Quote:
However, their router is dropping packets, and not telling anybody about it, which means that the retry (I think) traffic is saturating the link, and our application isn't getting a realistic measure of the available bandwidth, which means it's not backing off properly.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is exactly what an IP router is supposed to do when it's overloaded. Sending "your packet was dropped" notices would effectively double traffic exactly when the network was trying to reduce traffic.

The TCP implementation is supposed to take the dropped packet as the sign to back off. This would appear to be RFC2988.

Matthew

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