MTU of the Internet?

Wed Feb 4 18:18:56 UTC 1998

> Date: Wed, 4 Feb 1998 10:51:44 -0700 (MST)
> From: "Forrest W. Christian" <forrestc at iMach.com>
> To: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry at piermont.com>
> cc: Peter Ford <peterf at microsoft.com>, "'nanog at merit.edu'" 
<nanog at merit.edu>
> Subject: Re: MTU of the Internet? 
> 
> Now it's been a while since I looked at latency vs transfer rates, so
> maybe someone who works on this on an everyday basis would like to comment
> on what ~200 more ms of latency on a 28.8 link would do to throughput
> end-to-end across the net (totals of something like 350 and 512 ms
> end-to-end).

We recommend that clients who care about interactive response use small
MTUs, and clients who care about download speed use higher MTUs.

It seems most of them agree that smaller MTUs improve their interactive
response for things like telnet, IRC, MUD, etc., particularly if they
are downloading/surfing at the same time.

Thx,
dennis