[Verse-dev] Verse and Packet Loss

[eskil at obsession.se]

Hi!

> I've spent quite some time lately testing Verse under degraded network
> performance.

Good it needed to be done.

> Anyway, I can say this, ainly to Eskil: when the network drops packets,
> it becomes pretty hard to establish a Verse connection. Once a connec-
> tion is up, it seems to work pretty well for my test case (uploading a
> 5120x5120 bitmap), but it's really hard to get there.

This is interesting. The connection system worked quite differently form the
rest of the connected protocol. The way it works is basically it tries to send
the same packets over and over until it succeeds. I think it sends one every
second or so. How does your algorithm work? if it removes x number of packets
each second it would be very bad for connections since there are so few
packets.

> I'm also seeing plenty of "Aborting packet decode"-errors in the server
> end, when trying to connect over a lossy net.

Interesting, that error keeps popping up for some apps, I still don't 
know why,
and it looks like verse handles the errors very well. Still it would be 
nice to
figure it out.

> These problems seem to
> begin at around 8% of packet loss. At 20%, I've not been able to connect
> at all. Needless to say, TCP does not seem to be hurt as much.

Then again TCP doesn't tell you about its Latency issues...

E