RFC 334

Network Use on MAY 8 🎀

okay bestie, the title block first! 🫶 This is RFC 334, written by Alex McKenzie of BBN for the Network Working Group, dated 1 May 1972. It's also NIC 9927. The original doesn't list a category, and it doesn't say what it obsoletes or updates, so I'm not guessing. 🙈

So here's the tea. ✨ Vint Cerf over at the UCLA Network Measurement Center just told us he needs to run some performance experiments on the network before the new IMP software goes live on May 15. 💅 These experiments are meant to see how the network handles heavy traffic going to a single site. The catch is that the network might "lock up" so that no traffic can flow at all 😭. (The new IMP software is designed to stop exactly that, which is very iconic of it.) ARPA thinks these experiments are super important even with the lockup risk, so BBN agreed to help and scheduled them for May 8. 🔥

Honestly? We don't know whether the experiments will actually cause a lockup 💀, but we suggest that sites don't schedule anything important for Monday, May 8. 🌸 And sorry this announcement is so late, we know it's a lot. 🥺🫶

Machine-readable note: This RFC was put into machine-readable form for the online RFC archives by BBN Corp. under the direction of Alex McKenzie, 12/96. 💜