[17231] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: PC Bozo's World bites again (CNN, too)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Dillon)
Thu May 28 00:44:23 1998
Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 21:40:25 -0700 (PDT)
From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <356CA906.9DE5CE2B@methodfive.com>
On Wed, 27 May 1998, Matthew Marlowe wrote:
> That said, I think CNN messed up their explanation rather
> than giving wrong advice.
I don't think so. They even said in their article that the technical
details are based upon this URL
http://www.sns-access.com/%7Enetpro/maxmtu.htm
and this guy says stuff like:
And, it turns out, depending on how your ISP and other routers
encountered on the Internet handle your TCP/IP requests, that a MaxMTU
setting of 576, often referred to as the "Internet Standard", will in
many cases avoid the fragmentation of packets of data and the slow
transfer speeds which result.
> Stevens in TCP/IP Illustrated Volume I, pointed out
> that lower mtu's on dialup lines could significantly
> improve latency for interactive traffic while having
> only a small efficiency loss for data intensive traffic.
Most people are changing the MTU to speed up web browsing which is data
intensive, not interactive. I think Karl's explanation of broken Windows
TCP/IP stacks is more likely the root cause of the problem.
But has anyone ever done a proper test of this with sniffers at both the
client end of the network and the webserver end of the network?
--
Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Communications Inc. - E-mail: michael@memra.com
http://www.memra.com - *check out the new name & new website*
