Demise of Nagle's algorithm (RFC 896 - Congestion Control) predicted via sysctl
by from OpenBSD Journal on (#6MSHQ)
Is the classical TCP congestion control mechanism known asNagle's algorithm(RFC 896 - Congestion Control) headed for the scrap heap of history?
A recent post on tech@ titled Add sysctl to disable Nagle's algorithm (RFC 896 - Congestion Control) from Job Snijders (job@) with a patch to implement the disabling sysctl indicates that some at least think that deprecation is in order.
The message leads in,
List: openbsd-techSubject: Add sysctl to disable Nagle's algorithm (RFC 896 - Congestion Control)From: Job Snijders <job () openbsd ! org>Date: 2024-05-13 18:41:55Dear all,Back in the early 1980s, a suggestion was put forward how to improve TCPcongestion control, also known as "Nagle's algorithm". See RFC 896.Nagle's algorithm can cause consecutive small packets from userlandapplications to be coalesced into a single TCP packet. This happens atthe cost of an increase in latency: the sender is locally queuing updata until it either receives an acknowledgement from the remote side orsufficient additional data piled up to send a full-sized segment.