Yuchung Cheng says:
====================
undo congestion window on spurious SYN or SYNACK timeout
Linux TCP currently uses the initial congestion window of 1 packet
if multiple SYN or SYNACK timeouts per RFC6298. However such
timeouts are often spurious on wireless or cellular networks that
experience high delay variances (e.g. ramping up dormant radios or
local link retransmission). Another case is when the underlying
path is longer than the default SYN timeout (e.g. 1 second). In
these cases starting the transfer with a minimal congestion window
is detrimental to the performance for short flows.
One naive approach is to simply ignore SYN or SYNACK timeouts and
always use a larger or default initial window. This approach however
risks pouring gas to the fire when the network is already highly
congested. This is particularly true in data center where application
could start thousands to millions of connections over a single or
multiple hosts resulting in high SYN drops (e.g. incast).
This patch-set detects spurious SYN and SYNACK timeouts upon
completing the handshake via the widely-supported TCP timestamp
options. Upon such events the sender reverts to the default
initial window to start the data transfer so it gets best of both
worlds. This patch-set supports this feature for both active and
passive as well as Fast Open or regular connections.
====================
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>