Comment by nomel
21 hours ago
what's wrong with tcp, on a crappy link, when guaranteed delivery is required? wasn't it invented when slow crappy links were the norm?
21 hours ago
what's wrong with tcp, on a crappy link, when guaranteed delivery is required? wasn't it invented when slow crappy links were the norm?
Because TCP interprets packet loss as congestion and slows down. If you're already on a slow, lossy wireless link, bandwidth can rapidly fall below the usability threshold. After decades of DARPA attending IETF meetings to find solutions for this exact problem [turns out there were a lot of V4 connections over microwave links in Iraq] there are somewhat standard ways of setting options on sockets to tell the OS to consider packet loss as packet loss and to avoid slowing down as quickly. But you have to know what these options are, and I'm pretty sure the OP's requirement of having `ssh foo.com` just work be complicated by TCP implementations defaulting to the "packet loss means congestion" behavior. Hmm... now that I think about it, I'm not even sure if the control plane options were integrated into the Linux kernel (or Mac or Wintel)
Life is difficult sometimes.
It will time out before your packet gets through, or it will retransmit faster than the link can send packets.