What does TCP Zero Window mean?

What does TCP Zero Window mean?

Zero Window is something to investigate.

TCP Zero Window is when the Window size in a machine remains at zero for a specified amount of time.

This means that a client is not able to receive further information at the moment, and the TCP transmission is halted until it can process the information in its receive buffer.

TCP Window size is the amount of information that a machine can receive during a TCP session and still be able to process the data. Think if it like a TCP receive buffer. When a machine initiates a TCP connection to a server, it will let the server know how much data it can receive by the Window Size.

In many Windows machines, this value is around 64512 bytes. As the TCP session is initiated and the server begins sending data, the client will decrement it's Window Size as this buffer fills. At the same time, the client is processing the data in the buffer, and is emptying it, making room for more data. Through TCP ACK frames, the client informs the server of how much room is in this buffer. If the TCP Window Size goes down to 0, the client will not be able to receive any more data until it processes and opens the buffer up again. In this case, Protocol Expert will alert a "Zero Window" in Expert View.

Troubleshooting a Zero Window For one reason or another, the machine alerting the Zero Window will not receive any more data from the host. It could be that the machine is running too many processes at that moment, and its processor is maxed. Or it could be that there is an error in the TCP receiver, like a Windows registry misconfiguration. Try to determine what the client was doing when the TCP Zero Window happened.

Source: flukenetworks.com