Hello,
I have mutiple threads that are using a function that calls Send(). I notice that in Ethereal, some of the Send() calls are clumped into one packet. For example, I'll do two Send() calls with a send size of 10, but I'll notice in Ethereal, the packet size is 20. I want the send calls to be in separate packets. Is there a way to do this?
Thanks,
Yasir
You are seeing the Nagle Algorithm. You can turn it off using setsockopt, however, it is recommended that you leave it on.
I turned off Nagle's algorithm, and everything is sent separetely, but I only get back one acknowledgement. Why is this?
Be it as it may, suppose using Nagle's algorith, I get a packet of length 110, but on the receiving side, my buffer length is 50. Will I be able to do more reads to get the rest of the data? How would I know when to stop? The messages I sent follow a certain protocol, with a header that specifies the length of the packet, and with Nagle's algorithm, my headers are no longer that useful.
Last edited by Yasir_Malik; 05-03-2006 at 03:08 PM.
Ok, I ended up using Nagle's algorithm. I had to flex my pointer abilities on the receiving end, though.
Can Nagle's algorithm only place part of a packge when doing multiple sends? For example, if I do five sends at once and the five messages are bigger than the maximum segment size but four messages are less than the MSS, will Nagle's algorithm place all of the four messages plus part of the fifth message in the same packet?
In a tcp connection your recieving end shouldn't be concerned with which packet data is in, it must be treated as a stream. The reason for this is that data can be split up across the network (this can offen be unnoticable while testing on a single machine or even a LAN).
Turn off Nagle only in some situations to improve performance for example if you were sending mouse movements or other small amounts of data that you want to arrive without having to wait to see if there's any other packets to combine.
There are two approaches. If you are using headers then you know the size of your header so call recv in a loop untill you have the header then extract the data size and call recv in a loop again untill you have the data then get the next header. The other way is with deliminaters where you keep recieving data untill you recieve a deliminater which signal the end of a packet.
