Ian Lance Taylor <ian@airs.com> writes:
> It would clearly be wrong for telnet to turn off Nagle's algorithm.
> Nagle's algorithm was basically designed for telnet, to prevent each
> character typed from generating a new packet.

One wonders if, given that more apps seem to have performance issues
with Nagle's algorithm than need it, if we shouldn't invert the sense
and explicitly set Nagling for rlogin and telnet and disable it for
other applications.

> However, there is clearly a bad interaction.  I suppose one
> possibility would be to not delay the ACK of a small packet.  Or a
> more cautious approach would be to add a new option, similar to
> TCP_NODELAY, which would mean ``do not use delayed acks.''  This would
> then be set by any application which expected to receive packets of
> data for which it would not generate an immediate reply.  I think it
> would be appropriate for telnetd to set that option, fixing the
> nethack problem.

That might indeed be useful for telnet and rlogind...

-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com