Topic summary
Congestion avoidance
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Network congestion.
TCP window shaping
Congestion avoidance can be achieved efficiently by reducing traffic. When an application requests a large file, graphic or web page, it usually advertises a window of between 32 and 64 KB. This results in the server sending a full window of data (assuming the file is larger than the window). When many applications simultaneously request downloads, this data can create a congestion point at an upstream provider. By reducing the window advertisement, the remote servers send less data, thus reducing the congestion.