[Dxspider-support] Disconnects from another node

[charlie carroll]

A couple of years ago I spent quite a bit of time with an ethernet
analyzer trying to understand the source of disconnects between nodes. 
I recorded megabytes of data while waiting for disconnects that I could
analyze.  Eventually I determined that the disconnects were occuring at
the TCP/IP level due to delayed packets between nodes.  It appeared that
the transit time of a packet from the K1XX node to the K1EA node was not
the same as the time of a packet from the K1EA node back to the K1XX
node.  The packets seemed to back up someplace, to the point that the IP
took over and disconnected the link.
Now, the interesting part.  At the time of these tests, I had 25 or so
nodes connecting to me.  The disconnect problem was significantly worse
on Windows based nodes as opposed to Linux based nodes.  This lead me to
start investigating the IP stack parameters of each OS.  For some
reason, the Linux IP stack seemed to freewheel longer during a packet
outage.  At this point I ran out of time to look at the problem.

73 charlie, k1xx/4