Cisco ASA 5505, tcp window scaling (rfc1323)

I have a very odd issue with our cisco firewall,

If on our osx machines we run the following to disable window scaling support:

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=0

We see near 40% improvement in download speeds (tested using varying linux iso image mirrors).

If I sit my machine directly onto the outside modem (Manually setting up an external ip adress within the range etc), the bandwidth remains constant with rfc1323 enabled and disabled, so it has to be the cisco.

Something else to note:

  • None of our linux devices suffer this problem

Has anyone come across this issue before? I seem to find some vague references in old mailing lists detailing PIX workarounds which are no longer applicable to cisco ios.

Thanks in advance.

Answer

I am running 8.3 and cannot replicate this problem. although I did find this in the release notes for 8.3: “CSCsz11180 TCP Proxy mis-calculates TCP window causing connectivity problems.”
Perhaps you could upgrade and see if the problem remains?

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Oneiroi , Answer Author : Paul Ackerman

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