My new Fedora installation was playing up with certain web sites resulting in *very* slow download (I could see the words drawing on my screen one by one). A ethereal dump showed a nice big window size, but max 120 byte packets and an ack for each one!
Well it turns out since about kernel 2.6.7, the default tcp_window_scale setting has been 7. The problem is, as was with ECN, there are lots of broken routers out there which break window scaling (they strip the TCP options, which is totally against RFC, and common sense). So the other end doesn’t know you’re scaling, so it’ll think you set (or you think it set) a tiny ikle window size.
Anyway I fixed it for now with a ‘net.ipv4.tcp_default_win_scale = 0’ in my /etc/sysctl.conf, but there is a new kernel patch floating around which seems to be a bit cleverer and will be due in the next kernel.
