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Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

Every major corporation has multiple research organizations doing nothing but invest in things that don't have immediate shareholder value.

What you're talking about though isn't just coming up with new ideas or even new products. It's replacing hundreds of billions in infrastructure wholesale. The scale at which these changes needs to happen to be practical are at the cluster level in a single data center. If you can propose something that fits that bill there are a few companies willing to pay you millions in salary as an engineering fellow to do it.

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> What you're talking about though isn't just coming up with new ideas or even new products. It's replacing hundreds of billions in infrastructure wholesale.

I'd put it differently: it's paying up hundreds of billions in infrastructure to have some sort of gain.

And which gain is that exactly?

I see a lot of "the world is dumb but I am smart" comments in this thread but I saw no one presenting any clear advantage or performance improvement claim about hypothetical replacements. I see a lot of "we need to rewrite things" comments but not a single case being made with a clear tradeoff being presented. Every single criticism of TCP/IP in this thread sounds like change for the sake of change, and changes that aren't even presented with tangible improvements in mind or a clear performance gain.

Wouldn't that explain why TCP is so prevalent, and no one in their right mind thinks of replacing it?

I mean the goal is more performance, especially if you can get more performance out of the same hardware. Faster setup times, faster connections, more connections, maybe faster teardown. Lower contention on saturated links. Inside of the datacenter is a controlled environment where something like that could work. Replacing TCP over the Internet at large is going to be an uphill battle. Still, if we're replacing the whole thing, then simpler code on the client and server end would be nice.

> I mean the goal is more performance, especially if you can get more performance out of the same hardware.

Are there actual numbers demonstrating this?

I mean, people are advocating wasting billions revamping infrastructure. What kind of performance are you hoping to buy with those billions? And are those gains worth it, or is just sake for the sake of change?

Sometimes things are indeed good enough.

> Every single criticism of TCP/IP in this thread sounds like change for the sake of change, and changes that aren't even presented with tangible improvements in mind or a clear performance gain.

It amuses me that many of those saying "we need to change" are the same ones that bemoan it when car manufacturers remove buttons or make glove boxes operational from a touch screen because they can.

It's figure 1 in the paper. Homa is over 10x faster than TCP (presumably CUBIC).

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