Re: mtu 1499 works, mtu >= 1500 does not (1.3.91)

Russell Berry (rberry@albany.net)
Fri, 19 Apr 1996 09:04:05 -0400

I'm assuming here that you are connecting via modem, so I'll offer my
experience in the matter. I tweaked various modem speeds, and mru/mtu
settings trying to find the optimum performance. I've been doing this
since 1.3.69, and am running 1.3.91 now. Consequently, I get the best
performance from mru/mtu of 296. Yes, more packets, more overhead, but
my modem connection seems to be so shotty that retransmits of smaller
packets seem to offset the overhead by a comfortable margin. For
instance, this is a 14400 modem, connecting at 19200, using netscape, I
average 1.4-1.8Kbps. When I connect at 38400, the quality goes down,
but I'll get periods of 3.0Kbps!!! On a weird note, I once got 90Kbps,
I summized that netscape was actually reading from a file and thought
for some reason it was reading the connection and gave me bogus numbers.

Hope this helps a bit.

---russ