[aristus]

Credit should go to the Google "IW10" team, which did the hard work of testing this over years and (even harder) patiently convincing people one by one that this is a good idea.

I caution against fiddling with this number too much. Bandwidth-constrained users, and possibly mobile users, might be hurt with a too-large initcwnd.

http://code.google.com/speed/protocols/tcpm-IW10.html

[douglashunter]

Yes, tons of credit due there. In my post (http://bits.shutterstock.com/?p=74) I linked to Jonathan Corbet's coverage (http://lwn.net/Articles/427104/) of the topic on LWN, which is also a good jumping-off point for reading on the topic.