Steve Carter writes...
Theory tells me that for both types of traffic it is probably better, for response times sake, to have an asymetrical MTU (send = smaller, receive = bigger from the clients perspective). Servers set big MTU's, clients set their's smaller.
Irrespective of your MTU size, the file or web page, etc. size is always going to be the same, therefore, if you set a smaller MTU at the server or within the network, fragmentation occurs, meaning greater overhead for a file of a given size and due to this the end station will have to reconstitute the data stream out of smaller packets, meaning more CPU overhead.
I still think there has to be some kind of better approach to what it is we are doing when we have such extreme ranges of bandwidth capacity and the resultant extremes of optimal MTU. One idea I'm thinking of, and I may well even give it a try between a couple of Linux boxes over a phone line, is what I call "cell multiplexed PPP". Basically this would be a channelized stream that can parallel multiple packets. Small ones can come right through while the big ones are still working. That may only help minimally for parallelizing image loading unless there is added logic that detects the TCP ports and ensures that only one port at a time is taking up a channel. -- Phil Howard | stop3360@s0p3a0m6.com eat03me3@spammer2.org stop8187@no0where.net phil | stop0it9@noplace8.com eat7this@anywhere.org a9b2c8d4@no9place.net at | a6b9c6d0@dumbads1.net a3b6c8d5@lame3ads.edu blow4me7@nowhere5.edu milepost | suck2it1@spammer3.org stop2450@no8place.edu no6spam3@dumbads6.edu dot | stop5ads@dumbads0.net stop3437@spammer1.com a1b1c6d4@nowhere8.org com | ads8suck@nowhere5.edu crash722@noplace2.edu suck6it8@lame0ads.net