TWiki Changes

Last week, the PERT Pilot Knowledge Base, PERT Diary, and the brand-new PACE Wiki were remodeled upon a suggestion from AntoninKral (thanks!).

While the changes were generally felt to be an improvement, I noticed that in my normal browser environments (Mozilla 1.7 under Solaris or Linux), the bold font is indistinguishable from the normal font. Maybe this is just due to an unfortunate choice of fonts in the CSS style sheets used in the new "pattern" look and feel. Tests under Microsoft Internet Explorer show nicely distinguishable fonts.

I asked for feedback on the pert-discuss mailing list about the usability of the site, in particular the new look and feel.

AsymmetricThroughput

To progress the AsymmetricThroughput issue observed between the ESTEC (NL) and ESRIN (IT) ESA sites, MarcoMarletta was able to obtain remote login to a laptop at EsaEstecSite, and performed some Web100 NDT tests (without telling us which NDT server he used :-).

Although both the laptop NIC and the switch are explicitly configured for full-duplex operation, NDT reports a duplex mismatch issue. But as ChrisWelti observed, the discrepancy between upstream (laptop->NDT server, 225.65 kb/s) and downstream (NDT server->laptop, 18.81 Mb/s) is much too big to be explained by a duplex mismatch (alone). Maybe the duplex-mismatch detection code in NDT is confused by the difference in up/downstream rates - which almost certainly have a totally different root cause.

ChrisWelti also suggested 'taking the laptop and "go up the network tree" to see where the performance gets better.' Here are the NDT results

WEB100 Enabled Statistics:
Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Done
running 10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 225.65Kb/s
running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 18.81Mb/s

   ------  Client System Details  ------
OS data: Name = Windows XP, Architecture = x86, Version = 5.1
Java data: Vendor = Sun Microsystems Inc., Version = 1.4.2_06

   ------  Web100 Detailed Analysis  ------
Cable modem/DSL/T1 link found.
Link set to Half Duplex mode
Information: throughput is limited by other network traffic.
Good network cable(s) found
Normal duplex operation found.

Web100 reports the Round trip time = 31.37 msec; the Packet size = 1460 Bytes;
and 
There were 77 packets retransmitted, 784 duplicate acks received, and 788 SACK
blocks received
The connection was idle 0 seconds (0%) of the time
This connection is network limited 99.94% of the time.
  Contact your local network administrator to report a network problem

SimonLeinen asked MarcoMarletta to suggest a date for some coordinated tests between the laptop at EsaEstecSite and the NDT server at SWITCH, so that we can take a packet trace at the server, and hopefully also at the laptop, to further analyze what is happening.

-- SimonLeinen - 19 Apr 2005