Subject: Re: RFC: Nagle latency tuning

From: Andi Kleen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:55:57 +0200

Christopher Snook <[email-masked]> writes:
>
> I'm afraid I don't know the TCP stack intimately enough to understand
> what side effects this might have.  Can someone more familiar with the
> nagle implementations please enlighten me on how this could be done,
> or why it shouldn't be?

The nagle delay you're seeing is really the delayed ack delay which
is variable on Linux (unlike a lot of other stacks). Unfortunately
due to the way delayed ack works on other stacks (especially traditional
BSD with its fixed 200ms delay) there are nasty interactions with that. 
Making it too short could lead to a lot more packets even in non nagle 
situations.

Ok in theory you could split the two, but that would likely have
other issues and also make nagle be a lot less useful.

-Andi

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