What is "silly window syndrome"

n. (context Internet English) A problem in data transmission, where a server, unable to process all incoming data, repeatedly asks the clients to reduce the size of the packets they are sending — to the point where all packets become extremely small ("tinygrams") and transmission becomes inefficient.

Silly window syndrome is a problem in computer networking caused by poorly implemented TCP flow control. A serious problem can arise in the sliding window operation when the sending application program creates data slowly, the receiving application program consumes data slowly, or both. If a server with this problem is unable to process all incoming data, it requests that its clients reduce the amount of data they send at a time (the window setting on a TCP packet). If the server continues to be unable to process all incoming data, the window becomes smaller and smaller, sometimes to the point that the data transmitted is smaller than the packet header, making data transmission extremely inefficient. The name of this problem is due to the window size shrinking to a "silly" value.

Since there is a certain amount of overhead associated with processing each packet, the increased number of packets means increased overhead to process a decreasing amount of data. The end result is thrashing.