[15104] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: MTU of the Internet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean M. Doran)
Sat Feb 7 23:32:33 1998
To: Eric Osborne <osborne@notcom.com>
cc: nanog@merit.edu
From: "Sean M. Doran" <smd@clock.org>
Date: 07 Feb 1998 20:17:17 -0800
In-Reply-To: Eric Osborne's message of "Thu, 5 Feb 1998 01:37:33 -0500 (EST)"
Eric Osborne <osborne@notcom.com> writes:
> We all know that there's good reasons for all sorts of
> different MTUs, mainly because of the different types of
> traffic you could have - there's always going to be a
> tradeoff between efficient transfer of large blocks of
> data and immediaecy (sp?) of response time.
I know no such thing. My understanding of MTU is that the
Maximum Transmission Unit indicates the largest IP
datagram a logical transport medium is able to carry
without fragmentation.
There are, however, reasons why one might choose to send a
datagram (which may contain a TCP segment or some other
traffic) at smaller sizes than the transport medium or
media may support.
Sean.
