On Thu, 5 Feb 1998, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
Eric Osborne writes:
The problem with anything Microsoft may put forth is that it'll read like "576 is good. It is the best. We do it. So should everybody. If 576 is good, all else must be bad." And that's simply not the case.
I must admit that I'm very worried about what will happen to the internet if they do this. Why?
This will effectively triple the number of packets that routers have to do processing on, that's why.
Packets going through our border routers have an average packet size in the region of 200 to 250 bytes. How would this triple the average packet size?
I think that "triple" is perhaps an oversimplification. This assumes that without a 576-byte MTU, all packets would be 1500-byte MTUs. 1500/576 ~=~ 3. Remember, there's three kinds of average: mean, median, mode. While the mean packet size may be 200-250 bytes, the mode and median are probably different. I don't have any statistics on this, but I'd be willing to guess that if you plotted the packet sizes frequency you'd see something like a bimodal curve, with a small peak at around 64 (ping) and a larger one near 1500 (10Mbit Ethernet/T1 MTU). As to median packet size, I have no idea. It's probably somewhere in the middle. :) eric