IRC Net Bandwidth (was IRC and Security)

[Dan Bernstein]

In article <704 at seqp4.UUCP> jdarcy at seqp4.UUCP (Jeffrey d'Arcy) writes:
  [ routers ]
> Let's see just how poor they'd
> have to be for your original statement (that a 2-byte packet consumes nearly
> the same resources as a 500-byte packet) to be true.

I believe Chris's comments confirm that routers are just that poor.

This isn't a big issue. It's just that people writing WAN applications
should be much more worried about the number of packets sent than the
number of bytes sent. Perhaps someday the Internet will consist solely
of fast (10000 packets per second, say), modern routers, and a 2-byte
packet will indeed cost noticeably less than a 500-byte packet. But
until then, a service like IRC that uses 1.5% of the NSFNET bytes and 3%
of the NSFNET packets isn't twice as cheap as average---it's twice as
expensive.

---Dan