Re: MTU of the Internet?

["Sean M. Doran" <smd () clock org>]

Eric Osborne <osborne () notcom com> writes:

> We all know that there's good reasons for all sorts of
> different MTUs, mainly because of the different types of
> traffic you could have - there's always going to be a
> tradeoff between efficient transfer of large blocks of
> data and immediaecy (sp?) of response time.

I know no such thing.  My understanding of MTU is that the
Maximum Transmission Unit indicates the largest IP
datagram a logical transport medium is able to carry
without fragmentation.

There are, however, reasons why one might choose to send a
datagram (which may contain a TCP segment or some other
traffic) at smaller sizes than the transport medium or
media may support.

        Sean.