4.2.2.14 Data Communication: RFC-793 Section 3.7, page 40

Since RFC-793 was written, there has been extensive work on TCP algorithms to achieve efficient data communication. Later sections of the present document describe required and recommended TCP algorithms to determine when to send data (Section 4.2.3.4), when to send an acknowledgment (Section 4.2.3.2), and when to update the window (Section 4.2.3.3).

DISCUSSION:

One important performance issue is "Silly Window Syndrome" or "SWS" [TCP:5], a stable pattern of small incremental window movements resulting in extremely poor TCP performance. Algorithms to avoid SWS are described below for both the sending side (Section 4.2.3.4) and the receiving side (Section 4.2.3.3).

In brief, SWS is caused by the receiver advancing the right window edge whenever it has any new buffer space available to receive data and by the sender using any incremental window, no matter how small, to send more data [TCP:5]. The result can be a stable pattern of sending tiny data segments, even though both sender and receiver have a large total buffer space for the connection. SWS can only occur during the transmission of a large amount of data; if the connection goes quiescent, the problem will disappear. It is caused by typical straightforward implementation of window management, but the sender and receiver algorithms given below will avoid it.

Another important TCP performance issue is that some applications, especially remote login to character-at- a-time hosts, tend to send streams of one-octet data segments. To avoid deadlocks, every TCP SEND call from such applications must be "pushed", either explicitly by the application or else implicitly by TCP. The result may be a stream of TCP segments that contain one data octet each, which makes very inefficient use of the Internet and contributes to Internet congestion. The Nagle Algorithm described in Section 4.2.3.4 provides a simple and effective solution to this problem. It does have the effect of clumping characters over Telnet connections; this may initially surprise users accustomed to single-character echo, but user acceptance has not been a problem.

Note that the Nagle algorithm and the send SWS avoidance algorithm play complementary roles in improving performance. The Nagle algorithm discourages sending tiny segments when the data to be sent increases in small increments, while the SWS avoidance algorithm discourages small segments resulting from the right window edge advancing in small increments.

A careless implementation can send two or more acknowledgment segments per data segment received. For example, suppose the receiver acknowledges every data segment immediately. When the application program subsequently consumes the data and increases the available receive buffer space again, the receiver may send a second acknowledgment segment to update the window at the sender. The extreme case occurs with single-character segments on TCP connections using the Telnet protocol for remote login service. Some implementations have been observed in which each incoming 1-character segment generates three return segments: (1) the acknowledgment, (2) a one byte increase in the window, and (3) the echoed character, respectively.