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Digital Literacy

Posted by Sydney Hill
Sydney Hill
4,115 Points

Do TCP "data packets" travel independently (for efficiency) because different data is stored on different servers?

I understand that data is broken into pieces and travel independently for efficiency; So that no single transmission dominates the pipeline. But I'm curious if this is also because they access different servers for different hosted pieces of information. ie, a webpage getting photos from some server, fonts from Google API, etc.

1 Answer

Chelsea LeBlanc
Chelsea LeBlanc
2,476 Points
Chelsea LeBlanc
Chelsea LeBlanc
2,476 Points

I personally thought that they meant that they simply stored bits of data across different sources, sort of like how Torrent files work. I didn't understand it as storing different types of data on different types of servers accordingly.

Wiki says "An application does not need to know the particular mechanisms for sending data via a link to another host, such as the required packet fragmentation on the transmission medium.At the transport layer, the protocol handles all handshaking and transmission details and just presents an abstraction of the network connection to the application."

So basically, TCP's job is make sure all the pieces are there for the host to load everything on a site.