Reality check:  At the time when SLIP was *really* popular, the fastest you  
could go was "high-speed" 9k6 based on V.32. ;-)  That's where the 296 bytes  
comes in.

Anyone who's using SLIP today must be enjoying masochist tendencies.  It's  
like running V.32 with 32 byte frames (welcome to Telebit land ;-).  It hurts,  
don't do it.

Even CSLIP with header compression is so much more inefficient than PPP, and  
so much more prone to problems.. *ramble* *ramble* *ramble*

Can we now talk about useful protocols, such as PPP? ;-)

On Mon, 27 Jan 1997 08:36:16 -0500, "John F. Woods"  
<jfw@jfwhome.funhouse.com> wrote:
> Typically the sub-500-byte MTUs are to achieve .2-second packet times per
> Van Jacobsen's interactivity recommendation.  At 14.4Kbps, that's 320 bytes
> (assuming you run at least 19200 to the modem to make up for the framing
> bits the modem isn't sending).  At 28.8Kbps, that's 640 bytes.  Note also
> that the interactivity hints only really works if your connection sorts
> small traffic ahead of large traffic (otherwise your interactive traffic
> just piles up behind multiple bulk transfer packets), and a lot of routers
> don't do that (especially "bridging routers", since packet reordering is
> officially EVIL in the bridging world).
>
> I usually run 1072 on my ~24Kbps link, and I find that it sucks no worse
> than when I have it at ~300 bytes.  I do enough bulk traffic that I'd
> rather not send the extra headers...
>
>
--
Christian Kuhtz <ckuhtz@paranet.com>
                                                          ".com is a mistake."