lauren (04/15/83)
Greetings. I should probably clarify one point. In my own testing, it appeared that UUCP *can* operate with larger packet sizes (larger than 64 bytes, that is) *IF* both sides are willing to use that larger packet size. The problems seem to appear if you try to run with different packet sizes in different directions. In theory, this should work. In practice, it seems to fail, at least with some versions of uucico. As has already been pointed out, however, increasing the packet size will not greatly impact overall transfer rates -- the selection of 64 byte packets and a window size of 3 was made after considerable experimentation with other sizes and windows. The packet driver itself is amazingly robust and pretty damn efficient -- any efforts to improve communications rates indeed should be centered on the file transfer "setup" messages overhead. This could be improved in several ways without modifying the packet driver in any way. --Lauren--