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Will lowering mtu lower ping?


bvhv

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Most likely not, as deviating from the default MTU usually results in lower performance.

 

Generally speaking, modern IP over ethernet will use MTU discovery to establish the actual MTU from the source to destination, and adjust accordingly.

Forcing an increase of the source MTU will commonly result in the same data being padded within larger packets, and decreasing MTU will result in more packets of a smaller size, but greater overall size (due to repetition of headers and overhead).

Depending on whether packet content is encrypted or not, sometimes undersize packets will be queued, packed together to meet the path discovery MTU, then sent on as fewer packets. This results in a higher latency, due to the waiting of enough packets (or a timeout) to reasonably package together into something nearer the network MTU.

An oversize padded packet will end up being split into multiple smaller packets if it exceeds the network MTU, and even that initial padding will end up in the smaller packets. So really, you're just ending up with the same data across multiple packets, plus the additional overhead.

 

In short, adjusting the MTU will often cause unexpected decrease in performance, because modern technology is 'clever' enough to try and optimise for maximum performance itself. Rarely ever does tweaking the default, or forcing a non-default MTU affect performance in the expected manner. It's a good idea to just leave it be...

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