John Nagle

John Nagle is a networking engineer who defined Nagle's algorithm while working for Ford Aerospace. He published it in 1984 as RFC 896, titled Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks, where he described the small-packet problem: an application repeatedly sends data in small chunks, often a single byte, so that the 40 bytes of TCP and IPv4 headers outweigh the useful data, and many such packets in transit can lead to congestion collapse. His algorithm combines a number of small outgoing messages and sends them all at once. In 1985 he also coined the term fair queuing, while proposing round-robin scheduling in the gateway between a local area network and the internet to reduce network disruption from badly behaving hosts.