[clue-tech] Downside of increasing TCP window size?

[David Anselmi]

Jim Ockers wrote:
[...]
> "For TCP, the critical network characteristic is the latency. The longer the latency, the more 
> insensitive TCP becomes in its efforts to adapt to the network state. As the latency increases, TCP's 
> rate increase becomes slower, and the traffic pattern becomes more bursty in nature. These two factors 
> combine to reduce the efficiency of the protocol and hence the efficiency of the network to carry 
> data."

You might look at the web 100 and net 100 projects, if you can pick the 
kernel on both ends of your links.  The talk I heard said the problem 
was a high bandwidth-delay product but the behavior is the same as your 
quote describes.

They instrumented the TCP stack to provide more info and built some 
tools to do better parameter negotiation.  The claim was that this made 
a big difference in efficiency (perhaps to the detriment of plain ol' 
TCP clients).  I expected it to get rolled into Linux by now, but maybe 
politics prevented that.

HTH,
Dave