How to Adjust TCP Window Size to Improve Network Performance

The TCP/IP protocol sometimes shows its age.

It was invented in an era when networks were very slow and packet loss was high. So one of the main considerations in early protocol design was reliability.

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has built-in mechanisms for reliability that include validating a checksum on every packet, as well as detection and retransmission of dropped or out-of-order packets.

These features were invented when WAN bandwidth of 56Kbps was fast and packet drop rates of 1% were not uncommon.

Today’s broadband networks are many orders of magnitude faster, as well as vastly more reliable. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the bulletproof reliability mechanisms designed into the protocol sometimes cause problems. One of them has to do with a feature called TCP windowing.

What’s a TCP window?

A key reliability feature of TCP is the acknowledgement (ACK) packet. Device A sends a bunch of data to device B. Then device B validates all the packet-level checksums and sends an ACK packet that says everything was received correctly.

If everything isn’t received, some or all of the data needs to be retransmitted. Each device maintains a buffer of all the data just in case it needs to send it again. Receiving the ACK packet means the device can flush that old data out of the buffer.

The TCP window is the maximum number of bytes that can be sent before the ACK must be received.

If the network is unreliable, it’s better to keep the window small. This way you don’t have to retransmit as much data if there’s a problem. But if the network is reliable, then the window can be quite large.

One of the most clever features of TCP is the concept of a sliding window. Devices can change the window size dynamically, making it smaller when there’s congestion and bigger when things are clear.

Each device sends the other a suggested window size that says how much data it wants to receive before getting an acknowledgement. You can even have different window sizes for the two traffic directions in the same conversation.

Where TCP windowing goes wrong

TCP windowing is a very clever mechanism. But consider what happens on a network with very high latency and high bandwidth.

You can easily transmit an entire window’s worth of data before the first packet is even received at the other end. Then the sender stops and waits for the acknowledgement. Eventually, the receiver receives the last packet in the burst and sends an acknowledgement—a single packet that has to cross the network—taking the same amount of time again.

Each device can only send packets in these relatively short bursts. Then it must wait for the acknowledgement from the other end.

The average amount of data getting through the network is a small fraction of the total bandwidth. In modern networks, drop rates are so low, this slow transmission rate isn’t justified. All it does is drag down network performance

How to fix TCP windowing

The TCP window size is controlled by the end devices, not by the routers, switches, or firewalls that happen to be in the middle. The devices actively and dynamically negotiate the window size throughout the session.

But as I mentioned earlier, the TCP mechanism was designed for network bandwidth that’s orders of magnitude slower than what we have today. So some implementations still enforce a maximum window size of 64KB. You can get around this by enabling TCP windows scaling, which allows windows of up to 1GB.

Windows scaling was introduced in RFC 1323 to solve the problem of TCP windowing on fast, reliable networks. It’s available as an option in any modern TCP implementation. The only question is whether it’s been enabled properly.

In all recent Microsoft Windows implementations, windows scaling is enabled by default. You‘ll find places on the Internet telling you to change registry values to increase your window size, but depending on the Windows version you’re using, these changes will have no effect. The values may no longer even exist. Bottom line, you don’t need to fix TCP windowing in Windows, either on clients or servers.

On Linux systems, you can check that full TCP window scaling is enabled by looking at the value in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling.

On Cisco devices, you can adjust the window size using the global configuration command, “ip tcp window-size”. This command only affects sessions to the Cisco device itself. Network devices generally won’t change the parameters for sessions that merely pass through them.