Demise of Nagle’s algorithm (RFC 896 – Congestion Control) predicted via sysctl

Is the classical TCP congestion control mechanism known as
Nagle’s algorithm
(RFC 896 – Congestion Control) headed for the scrap heap of history?

A recent post on tech@ titled Add sysctl to disable Nagle’s algorithm (RFC 896 – Congestion Control) from Job Snijders (job@) with a patch to implement the disabling sysctl indicates that some at least think that deprecation is in order.

The message leads in,

List:       openbsd-tech
Subject:    Add sysctl to disable Nagle's algorithm (RFC 896 - Congestion Control)
From:       Job Snijders <job () openbsd ! org>
Date:       2024-05-13 18:41:55

Dear all,

Back in the early 1980s, a suggestion was put forward how to improve TCP
congestion control, also known as "Nagle's algorithm". See RFC 896.

Nagle's algorithm can cause consecutive small packets from userland
applications to be coalesced into a single TCP packet. This happens at
the cost of an increase in latency: the sender is locally queuing up
data until it either receives an acknowledgement from the remote side or
sufficient additional data piled up to send a full-sized segment.

Read more…