[gentoo-server] Re: Relatively recent guide on TCP congestion-avoidance algo's & traffic shaping

[Kerin Millar <kerframil@gmail.com>]

On 01/07/2011 01:58, Pandu Poluan wrote:
> Another factor that made me re-think my setup is the 'strange'
> characteristics of traffic between my office and our
> brand-spankin'-new subsidiary office 14 floors below us: SSH is very
> nice, but any big file transfers (sftp, http, ftp, cifs,*anything*
> biggish) will run well only for the first 10 seconds or so, before
> slowing to a crawl (and even managed to make WinSCP complaining of 'no
> response for 15 seconds'). But the ping's have no dropped packets at
> all.

With respect to this particular syndrome, I have found the approach 
described here to be extraordinarily effective:-

http://blog.edseek.com/~jasonb/articles/traffic_shaping/scenarios.html

At the time of writing, the link appears to be down but you should able 
to access it via Google's cache.

Also, check out the tosfix() function in FireHOL, which demonstrates the 
above implementation (and happens to be the best iptables wrapper, 
imho). There's an ebuild in portage but I would advise that you 
supplement it by grabbing the latest instance of the "firehol.sh" script 
from upstream CVS.

Cheers,

--Kerin