On 02/16/12 19:39, Martin Peach wrote:
As I understood it, the OS's tcp/ip stack will take care of putting tcp packets back together, the application will receive complete messages unless they are bigger than an IP packet (~65k). Only if the sender is dribbling out partial messages would that be a problem. Fragmentation is more relevant to serial communications, where a packet arrives one byte at a time with no obvious boundaries unless you use SLIP, or a serial wireless link where bytes may be lost. TCP just discards broken packets.
from the application's point of view, tcp/ip _is_ a serial connection. i don't think there is any guarantee that the ip-packets are not re-fragmented during transmission.
nevertheless, in practice you are right that you will experience problems more easily with large IP packets, and smallish ones (like the ones we were originally talking about) might hardly ever be effected.
fgmadr IOhanne