[p2p-hackers] MTU in the real world

[Nick Johnson]

Matthew Kaufman wrote:

>3) (most important) loss of any fragment causes loss of the entire packet,
>which magnifies the effect of packet loss (imagine that you lose 1 in every
>10 packets on your path... That's 10% loss if you're sending one-piece
>packets, but 100% packet loss if you're sending things that get broken up
>into enough pieces that 1 in 10 fragments lost causes every packet to be
>missing at least one fragment)
>  
>
Not exactly. Statistically, it'll taper off asympotically. For example, 
10% actual packet loss with each packet fragmented into 10 is (1 - 
.9^10) or 65% apparrent packet loss.

-Nick Johnson