OnixS Support receive questions and issues related to TCP network congestion so have written up an informational article of this complex area.
TCP congestion is characterised by exceeding a network's capacity which can result in increased latency and decreased throughput which can be hard to isolate and detrimental to trading strategies that are latency critical.
TCP congestion, occurring for various reasons at both the network and end-system levels, poses significant challenges. On the end-system side, several factors contribute to TCP congestion, including application behaviour, socket buffer sizes, TCP window scaling, delayed acknowledgements (ACKs), congestion control algorithms, network interface configurations, CPU and memory utilization, and background traffic.
This technical article summarises these factors contributing to TCP congestion and how the OnixS DMA SDK products provide low level timing data to diagnose and optimise TCP connections.