Speed Up Windows Vista Network Performance with TCP Windows Tuning

TCP receive window size (RWIN) is the amount of received data (in bytes) that can be buffered during a connection. According to Wikipedia, the sending host can send only up to that amount of data before it must wait for an acknowledgment and window update from the receiving host. When a receiver advertises the window size of 0, the sender stops sending data and starts the persist timer. The persist timer is used to protect TCP from the dead lock situation. The dead lock situation could be when the new window size update from the receiver is lost and the receiver has no more data to send while the sender is waiting for the new window size update. When the persist timer expires the TCP sender sends a small packet so that the receivers ACKs the packet with the new window size and TCP can recover from such situations.

The TCP window size field controls the flow of data and is limited to between 2 and 65,535 bytes, and cannot be expanded anymore. Thus, a scaling factor is used to get a larger TCP receive window size to achieve more efficient use of high bandwidth networks. The TCP window scale option is used to increase the maximum window size from 65,535 bytes to 1 Gigabyte. Scaling up to larger TCP congestion window sizes is a part of what is necessary for TCP Tuning. The window scale option is used only during the TCP 3-way handshake. The window scale value represents the number of bits to left-shift the 16-bit window size field, and can be set from 0 (no shift) to 14.

When dealing with slow network performance in Vista, the problem may be due to the above mentioned TCP Window Scaling option, where many older routers and and packet firewalls do not properly implement TCP Window Scaling, and rewrite the window scaling factor during a transmission, and causing sending and receiving sides to assume different TCP window sizes. The situation causes malfunction Internet connection, non-stable traffic that is very slow, or network connection that is only available intermittently. In Vista, the connection may appear to start working again for no reason after a while. If “Diagnose Problem” is selected in Vista, an error message will display “Cannot communicate with primary DNS server.”

Beside, Windows Vista enhances further TCP window scaling with auto tuning feature, where TCP stack in Vista system will auto tune and adjust the RWIN size to increase the percentage of full-sized TCP segments that are used during bulk data transmission based on the network scenario it encountered. And thus it’s no longer possible to specify a custom size for the TCP/IP Receive Window (RWIN) size with the inclusion of new auto tuning feature, unless the application it self uses SO_RCVBUF. However, Vista TCP auto tuning feature may get things wrong sometimes. Instead of optimal true receive window size, incompatible and out of range RWIN size may be used.

By default, Vista in normal auto tuning level will use RWIN size of 256 bytes with a scale factor of 8. This value is not suitable for all routers and servers which does not support TCP scale factor, and continue to communicate with 65536 bytes. For Windows Vista, users can change the behavior and the way Vista automatically tune the RWIN, by using “netsh” command to set the value for “autotuninglevel” parameter.