From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Mar 23 21:50:38 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id VAA02977 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 23 Mar 1996 21:50:38 -0800 (PST) Received: from cabal.io.org (cabal.io.org [198.133.36.103]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id VAA02898 for ; Sat, 23 Mar 1996 21:49:11 -0800 (PST) Received: (from taob@localhost) by cabal.io.org (8.7.4/8.7.4) id AAA12423; Sun, 24 Mar 1996 00:45:48 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 24 Mar 1996 00:45:48 -0500 (EST) From: Brian Tao To: Richard Wackerbarth cc: FREEBSD-HACKERS-L Subject: Re: Changing Ethernet frame size to 576 bytes? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On 23 Mar 1996, Richard Wackerbarth wrote: > > His suggestion is valid. If the MTU is larger than the minimum MTU > along the path, each packet that you send out will be broken into > sub-packets and reassembled on the far end. If any subpacket gets > lost, the whole packet is lost and must be retransmitted. Then why doesn't everyone on the Internet use 576-byte packets? I assume on a fast link, the larger the packet size, the less overhead there is in sending each one? I've never heard of an FTP server (or Web server or news server, since they could all apparently benefit from this) use anything other than the default 1500 MTU. -- Brian Tao (BT300, taob@io.org) System and Network Administrator, Internex Online Inc. "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"