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Comment by seabee | Hacker News Reader

You'd probably be inclined to cheat if your business had the most-viewed web page in the (Western?) world.

I'm not sure I would call it cheating. When I think of cheating, I think of a restricted action that gives an unfair advantage over competitors, of which is incredibly difficult for competitors to duplicate. But implementing the same hack, in this case, is easy, fairly common, and it isn't stepping outside of any real boundaries so it's not like the playing field is uneven. It also works and works well to provide users (customers) with a better experience.

The problem is that if everyone implements a very large initial congestion window that just causes more network load on networks that can't handle that amount of data all at once.

So it's not "cheating" in terms of your competitors, but it's "cheating" in the sense that either you're basically jumping the queue for your TCP flows or everyone else does the same thing and then things are back to square one, if networks can't deal with it.

An argument that networks now can deal with much larger congestion windows can be made, and Google is making it in the IETF, of course.

Absolutely. Think of the bandwidth cost of a single character. Google.com isn't made to be pretty, nor should it be.

I wonder how many gigs of transfer one can shave by cutting a single character from the Google homepage?

I wonder why they added so much crap to it lately then :P

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