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Consider the example of a download stream that can be throttled (eg. torrent client, dropbox sync, etc). How does a program apply backpressure to the network?

My thoughts are that, from a software perspective you can choose to read from a socket at a certain speed. But how does the socket you're reading from know that you only want your device to receive data so quickly? Does the actual NIC apply backpressure over the network somehow? If so, by what mechanism?

Kevin Cianfarini
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  • It's built in to TCP, but if you want the receiver to throttle the sender have it set the socket receiver buffer size to the desired bandwidth-delay product. – user207421 Feb 08 '20 at 00:02

1 Answers1

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Backpressure is embedded in TCP/IP protocol. If slow consumer does not read bytes from connection in timely manner, producer is unable to put more bytes than there are buffer memory on sending and receiving sides.

In contrast, UDP messages are not counted and can be dropped if there is no free memory on receiver side to store them.

Alexei Kaigorodov
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