From: "Ian McDonald" <redacted>
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 10:10:37 +1200

Understand what you are saying. That is why I questioned as 200 msecs
makes no sense on a LAN with < 1 msec RTT. So if the current is
ridiculous and 1000 is even more so, why do we use? Just because that
is how TCP is written I'm guessing.

We considered getting rid of the lower bound several times, but didn't
want to investigate it fully back then.

I know that in DCCP CCID3 the RTO is 4 x RTT (from memory - it might
be a slight variation) but we ended up putting a minimum on it as you
also face a problem if it fires too frequently (i.e. link is in
usecs).

I might ask around on research lists and see why this issue has never
been revisited.

There is also the argument that on a local lan congestion control
stops to make any sense.  The problem it that you can't detect what is
a local lan, and any config knob to indicate this is an unacceptable
hack.

Any "congestion" you see on a local high speed lan will be gone before
you can react to it, so it's pretty pointless to do anything.