Exactly right.

Candidates for turning off Nagle's Algorithm are applications which will create a trickle of a few small packets on a probably-quiet network, and yet should still be pretty low latency.

For example, a user who is typing would find it really annoying to suffer lag on full-duplex telnet. They can't see what they typed until the character is echoed back.

If your packets are big (multiple hundreds of bytes), if variable latency isn't a problem, or you are spewing many many packets to keep the network saturated much of the time, then let Nagle do its job.

In the 90s (and still today), tons of games developers would think that they needed to reinvent all the "promises" of TCP by writing a huge and ugly app layer on top of a UDP datagrams protocol. It's folly to reinvent TCP at the app layer, especially when all the infrastructure is highly tuned to do TCP really really well. Turning off Nagle usually opened their eyes in disbelief.

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

In reply to Re^3: I know two prints are slower than one, but 200x slower?!?!? by halley
in thread I know two prints are slower than one, but 200x slower?!?!? by rsmah

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.