I am often frustrated that when I am running a network-intensive
long-term process (generally a big FTP download), I get a big slowdown
of burst-oriented interactive use (email, web browser, etc.). This is a
particular problem since I am using a PPP connection. I have a couple
ideas for solving this problem, and similar ones.
First, I think that programs should have a netnice value (nnice?), along
with a nice value. When transmitting packets, lower niceness processes
(or threads.....) get higher priority. So if I were running a
significant-use ftp server, I could set the netnice for my ftp server to
13, allowing other processes on my machine to have better
responsiveness. Similarly, when using an ftp client to upload something
big, I could set the netnice to 17 and keep on browsing. The best thing
is that the performance of those big network transfers would not really
go down much. They would just interfere less.
This is only half a solution. It pretty much only solves sender-side
problems. For home systems such as mine the big issue is receiver-end.
When I am doing a big FTP download, web browsing often slows to a
crawl. I was thinking that there might be some way to combine
kernel-level changes with a modification of the pppd client+server to
support some prioritization of the PPP link. I don't really know how
this would work. It would be nice if I could set the nicety of a
receiving program (ftp client, etc.), and have that tell the PPP server
on the other end that it should make packets destined to ports owned by
this process a low priority. One possibility would be to buffer them
until there was network time (or their brief turn came around), and
dropping their packets when the buffer is full.
I think that some of these ideas (probably with huge modifications)
could help improve Linux network performance.
--Remove "NOSPAM" to reply. ______________________________ / David Feuer \ | dfeuer@NOSPAMbinx.mbhs.edu | | feuer@NOSPAMhis.com | | daf@morseNOSPAM.usno.navy.mil| \ david@NOSPAMfeuer.his.com / -----------------------------
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