Why is this web page coming up so slow? Investigating the loss of SYN packets (Work in Progress)

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. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.