Time to Increase TCP's Initial Congestion Window... Again

2025-08-17

This article argues for increasing TCP's initial congestion window, citing the limitations of the current setting in handling the demands of modern web pages and API calls. While Google increased this value to 10 in 2011, the author contends that this is no longer sufficient due to the growth in internet traffic and the increasing size of web assets. The article proposes increasing the window to 20-40 and adopting the BBR congestion control algorithm to mitigate bufferbloat. Although QUIC offers a solution, legacy equipment and enterprise reliance on TCP necessitate optimizing TCP for better performance.

Development Congestion Control