Comment by skrebbel
1 day ago
Nagle himself says (or said 10y ago) that the real culprit is delayed ACK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10608356
I’m no expert by any means, but this makes sense to me. Plus, I can’t come up with many modern workloads where delayed ACK would result in significant improvement. That said, I feel the same about Nagle’s algorithm - if most packets are big, it seems to me that both features solve problems that hardly exist anymore.
Wouldn't the modern http-dominated best practice be to turn both off?
The article does address that:
> Unfortunately, it’s not just delayed ACK2. Even without delayed ack and that stupid fixed timer, the behavior of Nagle’s algorithm probably isn’t what we want in distributed systems. A single in-datacenter RTT is typically around 500μs, then a couple of milliseconds between datacenters in the same region, and up to hundreds of milliseconds going around the globe. Given the vast amount of work a modern server can do in even a few hundred microseconds, delaying sending data for even one RTT isn’t clearly a win.