TCP: increase default initial receive window.
This patch changes the default initial receive window to 10 mss (defined constant). The default window is limited to the maximum of 10*1460 and 2*mss (when mss > 1460). draft-ietf-tcpm-initcwnd-00 is a proposal to the IETF that recommends increasing TCP's initial congestion window to 10 mss or about 15KB. Leading up to this proposal were several large-scale live Internet experiments with an initial congestion window of 10 mss (IW10), where we showed that the average latency of HTTP responses improved by approximately 10%. This was accompanied by a slight increase in retransmission rate (0.5%), most of which is coming from applications opening multiple simultaneous connections. To understand the extreme worst case scenarios, and fairness issues (IW10 versus IW3), we further conducted controlled testbed experiments. We came away finding minimal negative impact even under low link bandwidths (dial-ups) and small buffers. These results are extremely encouraging to adopting IW10. However, an initial congestion window of 10 mss is useless unless a TCP receiver advertises an initial receive window of at least 10 mss. Fortunately, in the large-scale Internet experiments we found that most widely used operating systems advertised large initial receive windows of 64KB, allowing us to experiment with a wide range of initial congestion windows. Linux systems were among the few exceptions that advertised a small receive window of 6KB. The purpose of this patch is to fix this shortcoming. References: 1. A comprehensive list of all IW10 references to date. http://code.google.com/speed/protocols/tcpm-IW10.html 2. Paper describing results from large-scale Internet experiments with IW10. http://ccr.sigcomm.org/drupal/?q=node/621 3. Controlled testbed experiments under worst case scenarios and a fairness study. http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/79/slides/tcpm-0.pdf 4. Raw test data from testbed experiments (Linux senders/receivers) with initial congestion and receive windows of both 10 mss. http://research.csc.ncsu.edu/netsrv/?q=content/iw10 5. Internet-Draft. Increasing TCP's Initial Window. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tcpm-initcwnd/Signed-off-by: Nandita Dukkipati <nanditad@google.com> Acked-by: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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