So I'm having a discussion with a friend, and we're debating what seems like an obvious point:
Is it actually any cheaper to send a 0-byte UDP packet than to send one that is sized at the MTU? I'd *hope* that it's cheaper, but I don't honestly know if this is the case. Now of course the overhead of UDP, IP, Ethernet and so on is fixed irrespective of the UDP payload size. But I don't know enough about the lower layers of the protocol stack to say with certainty that more 0-byte UDP packets can be delivered per second over (say) a typical DSL connection than a 1300 byte UDP packet. Do you know? For example, I'm kinda sketchy about the physical layer of Ethernet. But if two computers are on the same Ethernet, then they need to broadcast on the same physical wire. I don't know precisely what that entails, but I assume that takes a nonzero amount of time, especially if there is a collision to resolve. Is it possible that the simple overhead of sending *any* packet dwarfs the amount of time it takes to send the payload? In other words, to what degree should a UDP protocol attempt to shave off that extra few bytes per packet? -david
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