Re: [Pan-users] Policy discussion: GNKSA

[Alan Meyer]

I'd be in favor of keeping the GNKSA seal of approval and, as
some others have said, four connections is plenty for me.

I'd also be curious to know where the knee of the curve is on
connections.  Even assuming infinite capacity computers, there
are still potentially two throttles in place on download speed.
There is a max speed for any one connection, which could be
imposed at the server end or in the intermediate infrastructure,
and there is a max total throughput.

If you have, for example, a 1 MB/sec connection to the Internet,
you can get the same number of bytes with one connection at 1 MB
or four connections at 250 KB.  Increasing to 20 connections
cannot help you at all unless the server, or something else in
the pipeline, is throttling each connection to below 250 KB.

There may be small efficiencies in having multiple connections.
If one stalls at the server end for a disk read or a context
switch, or at the client end for a disk write, the other
connections are still pulling in bytes.  But there is a limit to
the efficiencies to be gained there.  They are usually not large
to begin with and it's not clear that more than four connections
is helpful at all.  Two or three may be plenty for that.

Does someone have data to suggest that there is a real advantage
to having more than four connections?

--
Alan Meyer
address@hidden