TCP Options For High Performance
A number of extensions have been made to TCP over the years to increase its performance over fast high-RTT links ("long fat networks", or LFNs for short).
TCP timestamps (RFC 1323) play a double role: they avoid ambiguities due to the 32-bit sequence number field wrapping around, and they allow more precise RTT estimation in the presence of multiple losses per RTT. With those improvements, it becomes reasonable to increase the TCP window beyond 64 kB, which can be done using the window scaling option (RFC 1323).
The TCP selective acknowledgment options (SACK, RFC 2018) allows a TCP receiver to precisely inform the TCP server about which segments have been lost. This increases performance on high-RTT links, when multiple losses per window are possible.
Path MTU discovery avoids the need for in-network fragmentation, which increases performance in the presence of losses.
Read more about this topic: TCP Tuning
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