Finding fragmentation problems
Fragmentation is a common mechanism in IP that takes a large IP packet and divides it into smaller-size packets that will fit in the Layer-2 Ethernet frames. In most of the cases, there shouldn't be any problems with the mechanism, but there might be performance issues due to this mechanism.
Getting ready
Just open Wireshark, connect it to the network, configure port mirror to the device that you want to test, and start it. Fragmentation will mostly influence interactive applications such as databases, and these are the places where we should look for problems.
How to do it...
When fragmentation takes place, you will see UDP or TCP packets along with fragmented IP Protocol packets, as shown in the following screenshot:
While suspecting performance problems, for example, a database client that experiences slow connectivity with the server, follow these steps to see if the problem is due to fragmentation:
Test the connectivity between clients and the server to verify...
