[15032] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: MTU of the Internet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ken emery)
Thu Feb 5 15:06:22 1998
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 1998 11:49:10 -0800 (PST)
From: ken emery <ken@cnet.com>
To: George Swallow <swallow@cisco.com>
cc: Per Gregers Bilse <pgb@EU.net>, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <199802051730.MAA07578@dungeon.cisco.com>
On Thu, 5 Feb 1998, George Swallow wrote:
> >IP packet size distribution (38569M total packets):
> > 1-32 64 96 128 160 192 224 256 288 320 352 384 416 448 480
> > .000 .400 .046 .016 .018 .012 .008 .009 .011 .012 .006 .007 .005 .004 .004
> >
> > 512 544 576 1024 1536 2048 2560 3072 3584 4096 4608
> > .010 .006 .120 .000 .099 .197 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000
>
> Note that if every 1536 packet became 3 paskets and every 2048 packet
> became 4 packets that would increase the packet count by 80% !!!
Unfortunately this will be rather impossible with the MTU currently
set to 1536 the 2048 byte packets must be coming from another source
(router to router connections?). So the number of 2048 packet will
stay the same, but the 1536 ones will triple (adding ~20% more packets
in this scenario).
The big win (from the users perspective) is that web pages update
quicker. Instead of sitting there waiting for a large packet to come
in before a page is partially updated the user could have 2/3 of the data
already onto the page. While it might not be "the right thing to do"
from the perspective of helping the "internet" function the perceived
speed by the end user is higher and that is part of the battle we are
all fighting (witness the coming deployment of more localized caches).
bye,
ken emery
