Comment by avianlyric

> A stream where data is delivered ASAP is better than a stream where the data gets delayed

That depends on your situation, because as you say no abstraction is perfect. Having a stream delivered “faster” isn’t helpful if means your overhead makes up 50% of your traffic, exactly what nagle avoids.

Nagles algorithm is also pretty smart, it’s only going to delay your next packet until it’s either full, or the far end has acknowledged your preceding packet. If your got a crap ton of data to send, and you’re dumping straight into the TCP buffer, then Nagle won’t delay anything because there’s enough data to fill packets. Nagle only kicks in if you’re doing many frequent tiny writes to a TCP connection, which is rarely a valid thing to do if you care about latency and throughput, so Nagles algorithm assuming the dev has made a mistake is reasonable.

If you really care about stream latency, then UDP is your friend. Then you can completely dispense with all the traffic control processes in TCP and have stuff sent exactly when you want it sent.