Jean-Paul Calderone wrote:
... On a LAN, it's likely that you'll generally get the exact number of bytes which the sender passed to one call of send (until the sender starts to pass really huge strings to send, then it'll get split up) just because the network has lots of capacity compared to the traffic you're putting on it. However, even on a LAN it's not guaranteed, and on the internet, it's extremely likely that this won't happen most of the time.
I don't mean to rebut your point here,rather to "pile on" with a bit more information. One point I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion is that nodes in the internet that carry the TCP/IP traffic are allowed to, for their own purposes, break large packets up into several smaller packets, and combine several smaller packets into a single larger packet. So, no matter how your TCP/IP packets leave your machine, there is no guarantee they will reach the destination in the same clumps. It is the stream, and not the packets, that is provided by TCP/IP. --Scott David Daniels scott.dani...@acm.org -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
