TCP Silly Window Syndrome
In the description of TCP's maximum segment size (MSS) parameter in Chapter 48, I explained the trade-off in determining the optimal size of TCP segments. If segments are too large, we risk having them become fragmented at the IP level. If they're too small, we get greatly reduced performance, because we are sending a small amount of data in a segment with at least 40 bytes of header overhead. We also use up valuable processing time that is required to handle each of these small segments.
The MSS parameter ensures that we don't send segments that are too large; TCP is not allowed to create a segment larger than the MSS. Unfortunately, the basic sliding windows mechanism doesn't provide any minimum size of segment that ...
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