Lightwight socket IO wrapper

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:

> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 11:55 AM, Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> wrote:
>> Another nice thing about TCP is that wil a little effort you get to
>> pack multiple data packets (or partial data packets) into a network
>> packet, etc.
>
> Emphatically - a little effort sometimes, and other times no effort at
> all! If you write a packet of data, then write another one, and
> another, and another, and another, without waiting for responses,
> Nagling should combine them automatically. And even if they're not
> deliberately queued by Nagle's Algorithm, packets can get combined for
> other reasons. So, yeah! Definitely can help a lot with packet counts
> on small writes.

Unfortunately, Nagle and delayed ACK, which are both defaults, don't go
well together (you get nasty 200-millisecond hickups).

I recommend using socket.TCP_CORK with socket.TCP_NODELAY where they are
available (Linux). They give you Nagle without delayed ACK. See

   <URL: http://linux.die.net/man/7/tcp>


As for the topic, TCP doesn't need wrappers to abstract away the
difficult bits. That's a superficially good idea that leads to trouble.


Marko