In message <55E4F62B.6060300@necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp>, Masataka Ohta writes:
William Herrin wrote:
for routers, generating ICMP PTB is as burdensome as generating fragments?
No, it isn't.
Yes, it is. Generating an ICMP PTB is as burdensome as fragmenting a packet.
Well it could be done at wire speed. It just requires more complicated hardware. Routers usually punt it to the cpu but there is no real reason that they have to do that. There is no theoretical reason why it has to be more burdensome than forwarding a packet. It's a implementation choice.
When a router fragments a packet, it has to fragment the next and the next and the next. Maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of packets before the end of that one user's session.
Not necessarily, because transport layer can react against fragmented packets.
When a router generates a PTB, there is no next. PTB is a soft failure. The origin must correct the error (by reducing packet size)
What if, the origin does not reduce packet size?
The communiction fails. Additionally routers normally rate limit PTB generation thereby reducing cpu loads to a acceptable level which is the whole point of moving the fragmentation to the originating node.
Masataka Ohta
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