[uf-discuss] Size considerations

[Ryan King]

On Oct 19, 2006, at 12:43 PM, Andy Mabbett wrote:

> In message <4f560ed2c921feca9e9eccc7a79a6c94 at technorati.com>, Kevin
> Marks <kmarks at technorati.com> writes
>> In itself, it's not significant, as it is well under a packet  
>> size, as I said, and so will not affect download time.
>
> Why is packet size relevant?

The cost of sending and receiving data in TCP/IP is broken up into  
fixed costs (ie, things that are constant for every connection or  
every packet) and the variable time needed the send the actual data.

In the case of short connections with small amounts data, the fixed  
costs will greatly outweigh the variable ones. This means that saving  
a fraction of a packet will have negligible impact on the performance  
of the TCP/IP socket.

-ryan