> It's been a while, but IIRC TCP will, under some conditions, delay
> sending some small data (an ACK, a single byte [keystroke]) in hopes of
> accumulating more to send.  Under heavy traffic conditions this does
> improve throughput, since it reduces the packet overhead for the total
> flow.  A tenth of a second sounds about right for that, I think.

Ha!  Well, that would make sense, then.  The supreme irony being that (in this
case) the combination of windows delaying (in hopes of reducing the number of
packets) and linux (sending the data out right away, rather than waiting even
a millisecond, thus postponing the body of the response till some future
packet) actually causes a serious performance problem.  If linux would wait
(thus reducing packet count), or if windows didn't wait, (reducing packet
latency) the problem would go away.

That's life.

Anyway, by using a producer, the twisted framework ends up pushing as much
data as it can per socket.write().  On my machine this worked out to 64kB.
More than enough for most responses.  Of course, that doesn't guarantee the
whole set of data goes out in one packet (it may be too much for one packet.
Usually is, in fact.), but it's the best we can do to reduce the count, I
think.

Jason