TCP Pace Yourself
TCP congestion control strives to optimize network goodput while minimizing packet loss by moderating transmission speed. Unfortunately, the way that congestion control moderates transmission often r...
Published Mar 14, 2014
Version 1.0
If you're trying to transmit anything larger than ~15 kbytes, then that's where rate pacing helps significantly when the network has congestion. Below that is where you care about initial window.
For example, I've seen that with this update to our TCP stack that with 8:1 congestion, connected to a white-box TOR switch that has a very small buffer size and no RED and no flow control the switch that we caused the switch to drop ~ .01% packets at fairly high concurrency. A TCP stack without rate pacing and with a small switch buffer would perform >50x worse than that at 8:1 congestion.
This was constant, overdriven load of 80G of traffic pointed at a 10G interface on a white-box TOR switch.