My Job is a Dork
May 19th, 2006 by owenamAn actual email that I actually sent to an actual coworker:
[Another coworker] would expect this behavior given the system’s default net.inet.tcp.sendspace of ~16K. Makes sense to me – since the TCP stack might have to retransmit at any moment, it can only have as much unacknowledged data out on the wire as it has in its send buffer.
You could verify that this is what you’re hitting by increasing the sendspace and see if the pauses become correspondingly less frequent.
I’d be wary of increasing the sendspace to 500K, though – you’d be allocating 0.5MB of memory for each connection.
Seriously, though… some of by best friends’ jobs are dorks, too.