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Re: [802.3EEESG] On the topic of tranistion time (was Re: [802.3EEESG] Comments on our work from Vern Paxson)



Hello all, if I may weigh-in...  It is no doubt that there will be 
applications for which EEE is not suitable (and should be disabled). 
Such applications may include latency-sensitive cluster computing and 
some realtime streaming applications.  But, will these be a majority of 
applications?  So, maybe Vern's comments may still hold for the majority 
of cases.  Over time it seems that applications have become more robust, 
not less so, to loss and delay. As bandwidth, processing, and memory 
capacity have all increased the need for fine grained control (for 
classic "QoS") has diminished.

In a previous email to this list, Geoff suggested a control packet to 
maintain a soft state of "link power management = off".  Did I 
understand this correctly?  I think that remote management of power 
state of links and devices will become an interesting problem area for 
many protocol standards.  DMTF looked at this in 2004.  Should such 
power management control occur at the 802.3 level?

For speed of packet transmission, there are two factors: transmission 
time and end-to-end latency.  For small packets, the latter may 
dominate.  For a 64 byte packet, the transmission time at 100 Mb/s is 
about 5 microseconds and at 1 Gb/s it is about 0.5 microseconds... is 
there any protocol (or operating system or device) that is sufficiently 
sensitive to tell the difference between 0.5 and 5 microseconds?

Thanks for letting me say a few words.

Regards,

Ken Christensen
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Florida
Phone: (813) 974-4761
Web: http://www.csee.usf.edu/~christen