Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!RICE.EDU!retrac From: retrac@RICE.EDU (John Carter) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Packet size distribution Message-ID: <1988.05.16.13.40.02.retrac.16163@titan.rice.edu> Date: 16 May 88 18:40:01 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 17 Roger, When I ran a series of traces of our ethernet (which my or may not be particularly representative), I found that most packets were either very small (e.g. ARP, RIP, telnet packets) or very large (e.g. FTP). Small packets were the most common. Large packets tended to come in bursts (such as when a user loads a file in to a workstation). Medium sized packets were fairly uncommon. There is a paper entitled "Network Measurement of the VMTP Request-Response Protocol in the V Distributed System" by Cheriton and Williamson in 1987 ACM Sigmetrics Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems. They found that there was a similar distribution for VMTP packets. John Carter Rice University retrac@rice.edu