This reminds me of an issue I had to debug over a decade ago. Our product had its own protocol written atop TCP, but its handshake was written in a way such that it was much slower than it should have been due to delays caused by the Nagle algorithm.
Turning on TCP_NODELAY was a quick-n-dirty fix, but the real fix was to rewrite the handshake to be more compatible with the inner workings of TCP.
Turning on TCP_NODELAY was a quick-n-dirty fix, but the real fix was to rewrite the handshake to be more compatible with the inner workings of TCP.