IRC Net Bandwidth (was IRC and Security)

[Jeffrey D'Arcy]

brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>But it's the packets that cost. A 2-byte packet costs almost as much as
>a 500-byte packet.

Yeah, right.  On an Ethernet, you have a 14-byte Ethernet header, 20-byte
IP header, 20-byte TCP header, a couple of trailers...all told less than
60 bytes, and I can't imagine other data links are that much worse.  That
would seem to make a 500-byte packet about nine times as costly as a 2-byte
packet in terms of transmission time.  Certainly there are per-packet costs
regardless of the packet length, but not enough to make your statement even
nearly true.