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TCP has a field called Urgent Pointer.

From RFC 793, about urgent pointer:

This field communicates the current value of the urgent pointer as a positive offset from the sequence number in this segment. The urgent pointer points to the sequence number of the octet following the urgent data. This field is only be interpreted in segments with the URG control bit set.

Let's say I want to upload a file to a remote server that is handling multiple requests from multiple clients.

Can setting this flag improve the total perfromance of the transmission: speed, goodput, time?

If the above example is not suitable, in what scenario can urgent pointer improve performance?

anegru
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1 Answers1

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The urgent pointer is just a marker that this packet contains information which should be processed with urgency by the end application. It does not cause any faster delivery in the network and thus it does not improve network performance. The only performance it improves is how fast the application might react to user activity in that it can process OOB data (like a Control-S, i.e. stop terminal output) before processing all the preceding data (like terminal output).

Steffen Ullrich
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