“Network Packet Sent” reports the number of times a task went into a send sleep state while waiting for the network to send each packet to the client. The network model determines that there can be only one outstanding packet per connection at any one point in time. This means that the task sleeps after each packet it sends.
If there is a lot of data to send, and the task is sending many small packets (512 bytes per packet), the task could end up sleeping a number of times. The data packet size is configurable, and different clients can request different packet sizes.
For more information, see “Changing network packet sizes” on page 27 in Performance and Tuning: Basics and the System Administration Guide.
If “Network Packet Sent” is a major cause of task switching, see “Network I/O management” for more information.
