What can cause TCP/IP to drop packets without dropping the connection?

Question

I have a web-based application and a client, both written in Java. For what it\'s worth, the client and server are both on Windows. The client issues HTTP GETs via Apache HttpC

Answer 1

I haven't seen this one per se but I have seen similar problems with large UDP datagrams causing IP fragmentation which lead to congestion and ultimately dropped Ethernet frames. Since this is TCP/IP I wouldn't expect IP fragmentation to be a large issue since it is a stream-based protocol.

One thing that I will note is that TCP does not guarantee delivery! It can't. What it does guarantee is that if you send byte A followed by byte B, then you will never receive byte B before you have received byte A.

With that said, I would connect the client machine and a monitoring machine to a hub. Run Wireshark on the monitoring machine and you should be able to see what is going on. I did run into problems related to both whitespace handling between HTTP requests and incorrect HTTP chunk sizes. Both issues were due to a hand written HTTP stack so this is only a problem if you are using a flaky stack.