There are still too many boxes out there that drop the main packet
when doing an ARP. This hurts UDP stuff more than TCP flows.
> I spent a
> good chunk of time using the Internet on a regular basis from Tromsoe
> Norway where it took 10 .. 17 hops to get to my destinations. Lots
> of packets were lost in their travels, some days it approached 10%
> of the packets, and it was consistantly 2% loss.
Some of us are (unfortunately) behind some major US providers which
experience as much as a 50% packet loss rate on bad days and 20% and
above is quite common.
Now, if TCP/IP engines would do Path MTU discovery and quit sending
those little 500+ byte packets whenever something goes off their
subnet...
--karl--