Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Security Handbook

TCP/IP Improvements

Windows 2000's TCP/IP support has been enhanced to provide improved performance over various link speeds such as those defined in RFC 1323. Throughput for any link depends on a number of variables, but the most important factors are

• Link speed

• Propagation delay

• Window size

• Link reliability

• Network congestion

Performance improvements can be summarized in several features.

Large Window Support

Large window support improves performance when large amounts of data remain unacknowledged over a long period of time. The TCP receive window size is the amount of receive data (in bytes) that can be buffered at one time on a connection. The sending host can send only that amount of data before waiting for an acknowledgment and window update ...