[net-perf] bad performance w/o jumbo frames over large BDPs

[Mark Boolootian]

> In other words, if we're just interested in making sure there's no 
> packet loss on the abilene backbone, then it doesn't matter what the 
> nodes use, as long as they do RFC-compliant TCP, so that they're 
> approximating the type of production traffic that we would be sending. 

I don't think this is true.  I think Linux has a reputation for pushing
out new TCP features and tweaking the network stack in a far more ad-hoc
way than BSD.  I believe Internet2 should run a few *BSD boxes in addition
to the Linux fleet.  While web100 for BSD may not (yet) be available,
the stability and use of the BSD network stack as a reference makes it
important to have available for testing.  It can potentially help in
debugging the kinds of problems the Michaels are seeing (I'm not actually
clear on whether the problem is also being experienced with FreeBSD or
not).

As for fragmentation, if it is occuring, you ought to be able to run
'netstat -s' and see it.