[Tech] Backoff considered harmful?

[Michael Rogers]

Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> Throtting alone seems to work better though.  I wonder if we should disable the
> backoff logic and see what happens.  If we trust your simulations, we should not
> see much of a difference at all.

I haven't had a chance to investigate heterogeneous capacity yet - 
backoff might be useful for avoiding unusually slow nodes without 
throttling the whole network to the speed of the slowest nodes.

Cheers,
Michael