13 years ago, 10 packets was considered "cheating": https://news.ycombinator.com...

crawshaw · 2025-07-19T22:05:13 1752962713

We are in a strange world today because our MTU was decided for 10mbps ethernet (MTU/bandwidth on a hub controls latency). The world is strange because 10mbps is still common for end-user network connections, while 10gbps is common for servers, and a goodly number of consumers have 1gbps.

The range means MTU varies from reasonable, where you can argue that an IW of anything from 1-30 packets is good, to a world where the MTU is ridiculously small and the IW is similarly absurd.

We would probably be better off if consumers on >1gbps links got higher MTUs, then an IW of 10-30 could be reasonable everywhere. MTU inside cloud providers is higher (AWS uses 9001), so it is very possible.

mjevans · 2025-07-20T00:49:37 1752972577

TL;DR we'd have to switch away from Ethernet (802.3) entirely. Even Jumbo frames are vulnerable to silent corruption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo_frame#Error_detection

It was a good decision at the time, back when everything was far slower and more expensive.