Re: TCP SYN cookies and Bug #520668

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Craig Small:

> While initially skeptical, I can see that under high TCP loads having
> some sort of connection is better than having no connection. Connections
> with large windows will be dropped, but they would be anyhow.

This argument ignores the non-attack overload case.  Lack of window
scaling may increase the load (in terms of the number of connections
required for achieve a certain level of aggregated bandwidth), making
such situations worse.

(Window scaling is more important than it used to be because
bandwidth-delay products tend to be larger these days.)