Nagle's algorithm From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Nagle's algorithm , named after John Nagle , is a means of improving the efficiency of TCP/IP networks by reducing the number of packets that need to be sent over the network. Nagle's document, Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks ( RFC896 ) describes what he called the 'small packet problem', where an application repeatedly emits data in small chunks, frequently only 1 byte in size. Since TCP packets have a 40 byte header (20 bytes for TCP, 20 bytes for IPv4 ), this results in a 41 byte packet for 1 byte of useful information, a huge overhead. This situation often occurs in Telnet sessions, where most keypresses generate a single byte of data which is transmitted immediately. Worse, over slow links, many such packets can be in transit at the same time, potentially leading to congestion collapse . Nagle's algorithm works by coalescing a number of small outgoing messages, and sending them all at o