Re: jumbo frames

["Richard A. Steenbergen" <ras () e-gerbil net>]

On Wed, 30 May 2001, Wayne Bouchard wrote:

> Well, the way it oughta work is that the backbone uses the same MTU as
> that of the largest MTU of your endpoints. So, for example, you have a
> buncha hosts on a fddi ring running at 4470, you want to make sure
> those frames don't have to get fragmented inside your network. Idealy,
> all hosts have the same MTU and no one has to worry about that, but in
> practice, it seems to be better to push the fragmentation as close to
> the end user as possible. (That is, if a user on a 1500MTU link makes
> a request to a host on a 4470 link, the response is 4470 up until the
> user's end network.) Of course, path MTU discovery makes this a moot
> point. The conversation will be held in 1500 byte fragments.

Fortunantly hosts on FDDI rings are rare these days, but I'd love to see a
modern analysis of the packet sizes going through the internet (everything
I've seen comes from the days when FDDI roamed the earth).