Your operating system will deceive you and re-assemble the string you sock.recv(n) differently from the ones you sock.send(data). But here is the deceptive part. It will work sometimes, but not always. These bugs will be difficult to chase. If you have two programs communicating over TCP via the loopback device in your operating system (the virtual network device with IP 127.0.0.1), then the data does not leave your RAM, and packets are never fragmented to fit into the maximum size of an Ethernet frame or 802.11 WLAN transmission. The data arrives immediately because it’s already there, and the other side gets to read via sock.recv(n) exactly the bytestring you sent over sock.send(data). If you connect to localhost via IPv6, the maximum packet size is 64 kB, and all the packets are already there to be reassembled into a bytestream immediately! But when you try to run the same code over the real Internet, with lag and packet loss, or when you are unlucky with the multitasking/scheduling of your OS, you will either get more data than you expected, leftover data from the last sock.send(data), or incomplete data.

Not strictly a python problem, either.

source: Dfly