nanog mailing list archives

Re: MTU


From: Lee <ler762 () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 18:45:49 -0400

On 7/22/16, Phil Rosenthal <pr () isprime com> wrote:

On Jul 22, 2016, at 1:37 PM, Grzegorz Janoszka <Grzegorz () Janoszka pl>
wrote:
What I noticed a few years ago was that BGP convergence time was faster
with higher MTU.
Full BGP table load took twice less time on MTU 9192 than on 1500.
Of course BGP has to be allowed to use higher MTU.

Anyone else observed something similar?

I have read about others experiencing this, and did some testing a few
months back -- my experience was that for low latency links, there was a
measurable but not huge difference. For high latency links, with Juniper
anyway, there was a very negligible difference, because the TCP Window size
is hard-coded at something small (16384?), so that ends up being the limit
more than the tcp slow-start issues that MTU helps with.

I think the Cisco default window size is 16KB but you can change it with
ip tcp window-size NNN

Lee


With that said, we run MTU at >9000 on all of our transit links, and all of
our internal links, with no problems. Make sure to do testing to send pings
with do-not-fragment at the maximum size configured, and without
do-not-fragment just slightly larger than the maximum size configured, to
make sure that there are no mismatches on configuration due to vendor
differences.

Best Regards,
-Phil Rosenthal


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