Measuring Characteristics of Tcp Connections at Internet Scale

The most interesting finding is that increasing the initial congestion window — basically letting servers send more packets right at the start — can improve small connection performance by 30–40%. Considering that most Internet connections are short and lightweight, that’s a huge optimization target. It’s wild that the Internet’s default setting for this (10 packets) has stayed unchanged for over a decade despite how much faster and more stable networks have become.