["Small, James" <JSmall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: tcp segment of a reassembled pdu

Dave,

 

It’s hard to say without more information but two areas that I have found to make a significant difference in Internet performance are looking at the MTU/MSS and adjusting the TCP receive window up (sometimes enabling window scaling).  Especially on high speed Internet Circuits (100 Mbps and up), my experience has been that if you do not adjust the TCP receive window up you often do not utilize the full bandwidth.

 

From what you said below though, you first might want to look at the minimum MTU through the entire path.  For TCP, if the MSS is too high you will get segments spread over multiple packets which sounds like what you have below.  Is your firewall or Cisco router adjusting the MSS?  This is not unusual.  Sometimes though the remote end will ignore the MSS option and assume that it can use whatever MSS it wants (usually up to 1460).  This can cause performance issues.  You might want to sniff traffic before the firewall and after the Cisco router to see if there are any alterations to the TCP SYN packet and also to the reply SYN packet from the remote end.

 

If you have never dived into TCP tuning before my favorite book is still Steven’s TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume I although it is getting a bit dated and is UNIX orientated.  Depending on what Operating System(s) you are using, perhaps someone could recommend something else.

 

You might also find some of the following sites of interest:

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

http://www.speedtest.net/

http://miranda.ctd.anl.gov:7123/

http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/tcptune/

http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks

http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/

http://www.packet-level.com/

http://www.kohala.com/start/tcpipiv1.html

 

Hope this helps,

  --Jim

 

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From: wireshark-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:wireshark-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dave Hassall
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 6:35 AM
To: wireshark-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Wireshark-users] tcp segment of a reassembled pdu

 

Downloads of large files from the internet appear to be very slow. In fact ethereal shows that the 1MB file downloads fine at 70mbps but that this is followed by a huge number of “tcp segment of a reassembled pdu” messages and then a huge number of “continuation or non-https traffic” messages and it is these 2 groups of messages that cause a further delay of 5 minutes. Our internet connection is via a Fortigate 800F firewall and cisco router and 100mbps circuit

Any suggestions of where to look next gratefully received

Thanks

Dave Hassall

Head of Network Services

Bath Spa University

Newton Park, Newton St Loe

Bath

BA2 9BN

UK

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