Why does Python sock.recv receives data from 2 different packets?

Question

The behavior is random. I made pcaps with wireshark and tcpdump. Both show the packets length correctly.

When I do sock.recv, I randomly receive data from 2 consecutive packets. The behaviour is rare. From aprx 100 packets, 1-2 recv contains data from 2 consecutive packets.

The packets are sent very fast. Some are received bellow 1ms. However this is not a good indicator because other packets received in similar time diff are read correctly.

The socket is AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, non blocking and it is implemented using selectors.

The socket is a client

Answer 1

As @jasonharper says, TCP is a protocol that provides you with a stream of bytes. It doesn't provide you with packets.

If you have a protocol that runs over TCP, and that has a notion of individual packets, there is no guarantee that a single chunk of bytes delivered on a TCP socket will begin at the beginning of a higher-level packet or will end at the end of the same higher-level packet. A packet may be broken up between two chunks, and a chunk may include bits of more than one packet. The only guarantee you get from TCP is that the data you get is received in the order in which it's transmitted.

As noted in the comment, protocols that run atop TCP generally either use some form of terminator to mark the end of a packet or put a byte count at the beginning of a packet to indicate how many bytes are in the packet.