Readers should note that if the server were to support the negotition of larger MSS, this particular transaction would not have incurred any slow start delays. However, typical document sizes will cause at least one slow start pause when sending the result. Latency and Bandwidth Latency and Bandwidth are the two keys to protocol performance. Latency, as measured by the RTT, is a measure of the fixed costs of a transaction and does not change as documents get bigger or smaller. Bandwidth, as we discussed earlier, is a measure of how long it takes to send data.
Future Networks Improving available bandwidth is relatively easy.
All you need to do is buy a faster network. Since placing workstations in particle accelerators has been known to cause data loss, and since the second approach is in general contrary to the philosphy of distributed systems, latency is increasingly becoming the dominant factor in protocol performance. The cost of opening a new connection for each transaction can be clearly seen by estimating the transaction time as it would have been if we had been reusing an existing connection. If were reusing an existing connection the transaction time could be calculated as the time to send the request plus the round trip time, plus any processing time on the server, plus the time to send the response. The only figure in this list for which we have no estimate is that for server processing time.