[15146] in North American Network Operators' Group

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RE: MTU of the Internet?

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tony Hain)
Sun Feb 8 23:30:32 1998

From: Tony Hain <tonyhain@microsoft.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 10:50:31 -0800 

This thread has drifted all over the place and the only conclusions I can
see are:

The core infrastructure MTU is >= 1500
People are telling clients to set their Win95 MTU to 576
PMTU is randomly broken by clueless filtering
Some dial-access devices are buffer limited
A small MTU (53 byte?) would increase perceived response at the expense of
performance

I have been an advocate of the bigger defaults is better camp, but there is
a real concern that the wrong values could actually cause more damage than
their gain is worth. If the above list is incorrect or incomplete it would
be useful for people to constructively tell Peter that now. 

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