Hey, why don't we just turn off that pesky congestion control...

Alex Cannara loves to push those "why don't we just turn off that pesky congestion control" papers my way. I think he does it just to annoy me. Which is correct, because I can't imagine ever getting such a paper approved. But, as Britney likes to say, "Oops, they did it again...".

It seems like every other CS grad student thinks he can get away with "disabling of TCP's congestion control" and suddenly he's solved the problem of congestion. Or, to put it in medical terms - it isn't the disease, it's the treatment. Everything is wonderful if you just stop treating the condition - even if the patient dies? Very much like a physics student thinking he's gotten around energy conservation, when he doesn't get what total energy of a system means, and wow, he's invented a perpetual motion machine.

So what's the magical fix after congestion control is turned off? Buffers! What I would give for a dime for each of these assumptions. I've just gotten a patent grant on a new memory mechanism for Internet semiconductors, and after reviewing all the other patents in the area, I can guarantee it isn't just making a bigger buffer. And so would the gentlemen from companies like Extreme and Juniper. I suppose I've got to finish up my article on buffers for Byte and get it out pronto.

Buffers make the problem worse - they increase jitter. You have to reduce the reqs for buffering by better scheduling and reduce packet sizes, not increase them (in other words, no jumbo packets - sorry Microsoft).

All I see is another "force it through" way of doing things, with no appreciation of subtlety. As a woman in tech, I can tell a lot of these guys probably can't get a date just from the way they put together their proposals. After all, one proposition is very much like another.