I have an application that needs to transfere many small (1-3Byte) messages via a TCP connection (WLAN). I know that sending 100kB at once is much faster than sending them in very small pieces (nearly bytewise). Nevertheless the information I need to transfere is only 1-3bytes in size. Collecting data before sending would increase throughput, but it is important that the small pieces of data are transfered as early/fast as possible. So gathering data before sending is the problem. Now I ask, what would be the best way, not to send every message individually on the one hand and on the other hand not to delay their transmission longer than necessary. Now I'm thinking about creating a little buffer. When the first message is add, I start a timer with 1ms timeout. After that millisecond, data will be transfered. Independend of how many bytes are in the queue. But I don't know if this is a good solution.
Isn't there a way that the TCPClient/Server classes of .NET themselves have a solution for such a problem. I mean, they should know, when the current transmission is finished. In the meantime they could accumulate all send requests and send them out as in one transaction.
The TCP stack by default will already buffer the data internally in order to reduce overhead when sending. See Nagle Algorithm for details. Just make sure that you have this algorithm enabled, i.e. set Nodelay to false.