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*