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Asked: 2026-06-11T12:39:53+00:00

It says here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_window_scale_option#Linux Because many routers and firewalls do not properly implement

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It says here –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_window_scale_option#Linux

“Because many routers and firewalls do not properly implement TCP Window Scaling, it can cause a user’s Internet connection to malfunction intermittently for a few minutes, then appear to start working again for no reason.

There is also an issue if a firewall doesn’t support the TCP extensions.”

As i understand, TCP Window Scalling bad influence on performance of the channel when many short connections (web).

Disable TCP Window Scaling on Linux server, or not?

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It seems to me that the Wikipedia article you cited considerably overstates the case. The Microsoft Knowledge Base article it links to only cites 5 devices with this problem. That isn’t ‘many’.

    And you need to consider that the problem is caused by Windows Vista defaulting to an enormous window scale of 8, enough to describe a window of 64k << 8 = 16MB, a ridiculously large number. Linux may or may not trigger it at all: at present you have zero evidence about that.

    TCP window scaling does not cause ‘bad performance [of] many short connections’. It causes very good performance on long lived connections.

    I would place a lot more reliance on RFCs and vendor statements than on arbitrary Web sources; even Wikipedia. I corrected a major error in a TCP article there just this month.

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