Avg. Packet Size - Again?

Wed Jul 16 13:32:41 UTC 2008

As Valdis stated earlier:

> I predict that if you graph it, there's a ton of packets that are right
> around the MTU of the network. almost equal number of tiny packets carrying
> the ACK's of the mobygrams, and then a small noise level of "everything else".

That's pretty much the case for the last decade.  Way back when the 
"net" had more telnet and "terminal based things" the numbers were 
skewed to the left, but you can hardly say "Hello World" in 
HTTP/HTML/XML/CSS/Ajax/Javascript these days in under a megabyte :-)

Sample from our border:

> UTC-Edge#sho ip cache flow
> IP packet size distribution (1566M total packets):
>    1-32   64   96  128  160  192  224  256  288  320  352  384  416  
> 448  480
>    .000 .412 .120 .022 .010 .003 .004 .002 .002 .001 .001 .003 .001 
> .001 .001
>
>     512  544  576 1024 1536 2048 2560 3072 3584 4096 4608
>    .005 .001 .003 .027 .371 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000

versus our core:

> UTC-Core#sho ip cache flow
> IP packet size distribution (22714M total packets):
>    1-32   64   96  128  160  192  224  256  288  320  352  384  416  
> 448  480
>    .000 .453 .073 .022 .011 .052 .069 .045 .011 .005 .009 .013 .020 
> .007 .001
>
>     512  544  576 1024 1536 2048 2560 3072 3584 4096 4608
>    .001 .001 .001 .009 .188 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000

But those are fairly stock IPv4, no jumbos, plain-jane ethernet numbers.

Jeff