Value of congestion window (cwnd) when loss is detected

[hiren panchasara]

I am failing to understand the reason behind this behavior.

What should the congestion window (snd_cwnd) be set to when we hit loss?
It seems that we set it to 1 segment right now.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/netinet/tcp_input.c?revision=286227&view=markup#l2531

I also see that in the simulations I did. Sender side pcap can be found
at: https://people.freebsd.org/~hiren/pcaps/single_packet_loss.pcap

Trying to send 50kb of data from freebsd 10.2 server to freebsd client.
Initial cwnd is 10 so we blast out 10 packets but 1 packet gets dropped:
seq 2897:4345. We get 3 dupacks and we retransmit it. But as soon as we
detect this loss, we reduce cwnd to 1 segment. In fact, we could've used
data in SACK to see how much we could send on the n/w, imo.

3rd dup ack (which triggered the retransmit) looks like this:
IP 192.168.11.10.41674 > 192.168.10.10.http: Flags [.], ack 2897, win
12579, options [nop,nop,TS val 4236220288 ecr 3905376863,nop,nop,sack 1
{4345:10137}], length 0

And the retransmit:
IP 192.168.10.10.http > 192.168.11.10.41674: Flags [.], seq 2897:4345,
ack 172, win 12579, options [nop,nop,TS val 3905376894 ecr 4236220288],
length 1448

At this point in time, sender knows that it has sent 23169 bytes (last
packet server sent was seq 21721:23169) and received ack for 10137
bytes minus a missing packet = 8689 bytes. i.e. 6 packets. So, there is
at least that much room on n/w at that point in time. We can go
conservative and halve that. i.e. 3 packets. That is still better than
going down to 1 packet.

Is there something basic I am missing here?
Any insights would be helpful.

Cheers,
Hiren
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