Whilst it's possible you may be correct, I do have to point out you are, I believe, lecturing John Nagle, known for Nagle's algorithm, used in most TCP stacks in the world.
He has a valid criticism. It's not that it can't be fixed. It's that it's hard to diagnose.
The underlying problems are those of legacy software. People long gone from Linden Lab wrote this part of Second Life. The networking system predates the widespread use of middle boxes. (It also predates the invention of conflict-free replicated data types, which would have helped some higher level consistency problems.)
The internal diagnostic tools are not very helpful. The problem manifests itself as errors in the presentation of a virtual world, far from the network layer. What looked like trouble at the higher levels turned to be, at least partially, trouble at the network layer.
The developer who has to fix this wrote "This made me look into this part of the protocol design and I wish I hadn't."
More than you ever wanted to know about this: [1] That discussion involves developers of four different clients, some of which talk to two different servers.
(All this, by the way, is part of why there are very few big, seamless, high-detail metaverses. Despite all the money spent during the brief metaverse boom, nobody actually shipped a good one. There are some hard technical problems seen nowhere else. Somehow I seem to end up in areas like that.)
> Whilst it's possible you may be correct, I do have to point out you are, I believe, lecturing John Nagle, known for Nagle's algorithm, used in most TCP stacks in the world.
Thank you for pointing that out. This thread alone is bound to become a meme.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to embarrass you. I only meant to point out that people would err on the side of John likely knowing what they were talking about, whilst you seem to confidently have some misunderstandings in your comment.
For example, you said "Every timeout in every hop of the chain is within your control to configure", but I'm quite confident that the WiFi router my office uses doesn't respect timeouts correctly, nor does my Phone's ISP, or certain VPNs. Those "hops" in the network are not within my control at all.
Agreed, honestly if an argument is made and it makes sense, it doesn't matter who is on the other side.
> no matter how embarrassing and notably laughable your comment was.
I wouldn't even call the original comment laughable, they had a point - if you are in control of significant parts of the overall solution, then you can most likely mitigate most of the issues. And, while not a best practice, there's nothing really preventing you from sneaking in the occasional keepalive type response in the stream of events, if you deem it necessary.
The less of the infrastructure and application you control, the more likely the other issues are likely to pop up their heads. As usual, it depends on your circumstances and both the original comment and the response are valid in their own right. The "extreme" response was a bit more... I'm not sure, cringe? Oh well.
