Configuring the Packet Size

The default packet size for SLP is 1400 bytes, and this should be sufficient for most local area networks. For wireless networks or wide area networks, you can reduce the packet size to avoid message fragmentation and reduce network traffic. For local area networks that have larger packets, increasing the packet size can improve performance. You can determine whether the packet size needs to be reduced by checking the minimum packet size for your network. If the network medium has a smaller packet size, setting the net.slp.MTU property is necessary.

You can also increase the packet size if your network medium has larger packets. However, unless the service advertisements from SAs or queries from UAs are frequently overflowing the default packet size, configuration should not be necessary. You can determine whether the default packet size is overflowing frequently by using snoop to check whether UA requests are overflowing often, and rolling over to use TCP instead of UDP.

The net.slp.MTU property measures the complete IP packet size, including the link layer header, the IP header, and the UDP or TCP header, as well as the SLP message.