Time-To-Live?

I'm not clear on why Time-To-Live (TTL) is needed.  It strikes me
that this adds complexity to the server software while adding nothing
to the reliability or resilience of the protocol.  Why not simply
have the client time-out and retransmit and the server silently ignore
duplicates?

It worries me that an overloaded server could cause a huge number of
error messages and retransmissions to flood the network.  Consider
a high-volume SCMP server which becomes so oversubscribed that many
inbound messages are exceeding their TTL.  This causes a flow of error
messages to emanate from the server back to the various clients.  At
the same time the clients may also be sending retransmissions because
they've timed out too.  This might exacerbate the problem by increasing
the load on the server still more and resulting in even more error
messages.

Just a thought.

Chris.

-- 
Chris Davenport
[email protected]