Further details from @antirez:

It was reported by @StopForumSpam on Twitter that the Redis replication
link was strangely using multiple TCP packets for multiple commands.
This wastes a lot of bandwidth and is due to the TCP_NODELAY option we
enable on the socket after accepting a new connection.

However the master -> slave channel is a one-way channel since Redis
replication is asynchronous, so there is no point in trying to reduce
the latency, we should aim to reduce the bandwidth. For this reason this
commit introduces the ability to disable the nagle algorithm on the
socket after a successful SYNC.

This feature is off by default because the delay can be up to 40
milliseconds with normally configured Linux kernels.