All about RAC and MTU with a video

Let’s first discuss how RAC traffic works before continuing. Environment for the discussion is: 2 node cluster with 8K database block size, UDP protocol is used for cache fusion. (BTW, UDP and RDS protocols are supported in UNIX platform; whereas Windows uses TCP protocol).

UDP protocol, fragmentation, and assembly

UDP Protocol is an higher level protocol stack, and it is implemented over IP Protocol ( UDP/IP). Cache Fusion uses UDP protocol to send packets over the wire (Exadata uses RDS protocol though).

MTU defines the Maximum Transfer Unit of an IP packet. Let us consider an example of MTU set to 1500 in a network interface. One 8K block transfer can not be performed with just one IP packet  as the IP packet size (1500 bytes) is less than 8K. So, one transfer of UDP packet of 8K size is fragmented to 6 IP packets and sent over the wire. In the receiving side, those 6 packets are reassembled to create one UDP buffer of size 8K. After the assembly, that UDP buffer is delivered to an UDP port of a UNIX process. Usually, a foreground process will listen on that port to receive the UDP buffer.