Why Is This Web Page Coming Up so Slow? Investigating the Loss of SYN Packets

Authors:
Dragana Damjanovic;Philipp Gschwandtner;Michael Welzl
Affiliations:
Institute of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria;Institute of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria;Institute of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Venue:
NETWORKING '09 Proceedings of the 8th International IFIP-TC 6 Networking Conference
Year:
2009

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Abstract

Before the first valid calculation of the round trip time for a connection, TCP sets an initial value for the retransmission timeout to 3 seconds which, in the case of the first packets getting lost, introduces a long delay. For short transfers, like web traffic, this could have a significant influence on the performance. We performed measurements to investigate how often this happens. As our measurements show, control packets (SYN and SYN/ACK packets) do get lost and delays of 3 seconds or even more (further timeouts) occur. By means of a simple example implementation, we indicate that this problem could be solved.