July 2018
Intermediate to advanced
354 pages
8h 51m
English
In an effort to control network traffic, TCP implements a pattern called slow start. It does this to keep the network from being overwhelmed with requests. The details are specified in RFC 5681 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5681).
The protocol works where the sender or initiator sends an initial, small packet. When it receives a response, it then doubles the packet size. This volley is repeated until the sender receives a congested response.
The initial packet size is 14 KB. This back and forth is a series of round trips. If you can fit an entire page or response within 14 KB, it only needs one round trip to be completely downloaded:
In this example, the response is 10.5 KB, so only 1 round trip is required. ...
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