optimizing a program that just shuffles data, a bit like cat...

[Dan Stromberg]

...but with much bigger blocksizes, and with a netcat-like ability to use
sockets.

The program is at http://dcs.nac.uci.edu/~strombrg/pnetcat

I'm a bit concerned about the program's performance, because it actually
seems to get slower sometimes with larger blocksizes, which really isn't
what I'd been expecting.  Also the megabits/second I'm getting isn't
really stellar either, at least not when using it on an optical network
(fibre and optical switching).

Also, is there any way to make len(big_buffer) fast, or to speed up or
eliminate the string slicing required (?) to handle partial writes?

Thanks a bunch!

(I'll put up a descriptive web page on the program later, when I have a
little bit more time.  But for now, you can get a usage message with the
-h flag)