Acknowledge after 2 Packets but Window Size > 17k

[snifferer]

We have to tune a WAN-Connection! The biggest Problem we've seen in some Traces is:
"most TCP implementations generate an ACK packet for every two data packets seen"
Whow knows:
1. The reason for this? (only seen in Microsoft not in Unix)
2. How can we change this behaviour in W2000 and NT?
Thanks

 

[goku2]

We are seeing this exact behavior with our application running against a windows 2000 client. Anyone figured out a way to fix this?
Thanks

 

[johnny99]

If I remember right from when I took my first cources in the 80's.
TCP (layer 4) is connection oriented, so when the sender sends a packet to the receiver the receiver has to send a response back to let the sender know that the transmission was ok og not (ACK or NACK). This is the only way the sender can kno if he has to re-transmit or not.

Since UDP (layer 4) is connectionless I wouldn't expect to see ACK/NACK traffic from that protocol.

But on the IP level (layer 3) you would still have the ACK/NACK traffic for IP.