Raise initial congestion window size / speedup slow start?

From: Ed W
Date: Wed Jul 14 2010 - 06:50:47 EST


Hi, my network connection looks like 500Kbits with a round trip latency of perhaps 1s+ (it's a satellite link).

From what I can see the linux initial congestion window is signficantly limiting me here, with slow start taking many many seconds to open up the window wide enough to get the data flowing? For protocols like http this is really hurting with all the short lived connections never really getting up to speed. (throw in some random packet loss and things really screech to a halt)

Reading around there appear to be several previous attempts to modify the kernel to start with a slightly wider initial congestion window, say 10 packets. (Seems even google did some work on this and agreed that a small of initial cwd to 10 ish, would help even many non satellite users?) However, all the work I can find is quite old and doesn't seem to give me much of a leg up in terms of experimenting with such changes on a modern kernel?

Does someone have some pointers on where to look to modify initial congestion window please?


Thanks

Ed W
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