Comment by CamperBob2

Maybe, maybe not, whatever.

I was testing some low-bandwidth voice chat code using two unloaded PCs sitting on the same desk. I nearly jumped out of my skin when "HELLO, HELLO?" came through a few seconds late, at high volume, after I had already concluded it wasn't working. After ruling out latency on the audio side, TCP_NODELAY solved the problem.

All respect to Animats, but whoever thought this should be the default behavior of TCP/IP had rocks in their head, and/or were solving a problem that had a better solution that they just didn't think of at the time.