Patent ID: 7133902

Claim:
A method comprising performing a machine-executed operation involving instructions, wherein the machine-executed operation is at least one of: A) sending said instructions over transmission media; B) receiving said instructions over transmission media; C) storing said instructions onto a machine-readable storage medium; and D) executing the instructions; wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, causes: performing a read operation to read data from a first buffer that has a particular capacity, wherein the data was written into the first buffer by a DMA mechanism in response to the data being written into a second buffer at a second machine; based on a set of one or more factors, determining whether to respond to performance of said read operation by transmitting, to the second machine, an acknowledgement that the data was read from the first buffer; wherein said set of one or more factors includes at least one of: whether the read operation was a partial read in which less data was read than the particular capacity of said first buffer; whether acknowledgements have not yet been sent for more than a threshold number of previously read buffers, and whether an amount of unacknowledged data received by the first machine from the second machine exceeds a threshold quantity.