Nagle's algorithm was developed when it was discovered that telnet produced an unfortunate side-effect: each keystroke (one byte) resulted in a separate TCP packet, which is an enormous overhead (at least 40 to 1).
Nagle's algorithm implements the obvious solution of buffering small payloads at the sender until either there's a full payload to send or the receiver is waiting for new data.
This page last modified on : 2004/09/24 20:35:19 $.