> I ask a much more basic question: how often do TCP checksums fail?
>
> I rebooted my own Solaris workstation about 3 days ago. It talks a lot
> over the exterior Internet. In that time, it has counted two TCP
> errors and one UDP error, which are presumably checksum
> failures. That's out of about 2 million incoming packets.
One of the results from my study of Internet packet dynamics:
"End-to-End Internet Packet Dynamics", V. Paxson, Proc. SIGCOMM '97
ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/papers/vp-pkt-dyn-sigcomm97.ps.Z
was that the observed rate of end-to-end checksum errors is around 1 in 5,000.
This is after eliminating low-speed paths likely to be running SLIP over lossy
links.
More recent measurements by Craig Partridge et al are consistent with it
being within a factor of two of that.
Vern
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jan 28 2002 - 09:12:20 EST