FreeBSD 4.x and OS-X tcp performance

[Bill Vermillion]

While normally not able to pour water out of a boot with
instructions on the heel, on Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 07:51  
our dear friend Mark Tinguely uttered this load of codswallop:


> Thinking about the trace a little more, the Apple send buffer
> must be set much lower (about 18-19KB ballpark) than the FreeBSD
> recieve buffer (56 KB). If these settings were simular, the
> Apple machine should be providing more data as the FreeBSD gives
> the window updates - this would give the FreeBSD side more
> chances to give duplicate ACKs to recover quicker.

> For related curiousities, would you tell me if the FreeBSD a
> Uniprocessor or multiprocessor?

I remember having problems with a G4 in our racks.  Looking over
some old messages I found something that had slipped my mind.

A person I know who works for Omneon Video Technologies said
they had similar problems and got a patch from Apple to fix this,
and the patch was not a normally distributed one. Omneon builds
high-speed media servers for broadcast and video. [www.omneon.com]

I don't know if I can find this person again to check on this or
not, but this problem has been seen before.    I never had complete
details on this - so it could be in the rumor category.

My gut feeling is that it is something Apple is doing not FreeBSD -
or we'd have heard a lot more about this.

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com