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These are a lot of questions and even though I no TCP specialist, I'll have a go at it. There's much more detail to be found in the TCP/IP guide

1. MSS is not per definition limited to 1460, but it's a nice fit to Ethernet networks. Standard Ethernet uses frames with up to 1500 octets (bytes if you wish) of payload. Subtract the headers for Ethernet, IP and TCP and you'll get to something like 1460. You can go larger with MSS, but that could result in fragmentation in the lower layers (IP in this case), hurting performance.
2. The unscaled TCP window size it 65.535. It has no relation to the MSS. The MSS is related to the transport of data over the network, using the services of the IP layer. The window size has to do with the sending and receiving hosts themselves. How many resources (memory) can they spend on this TCP session for storing data for retransmission and handing off to the receiving application.
3. TCP windos scaling is a solution to the problem of growing network speeds. I'll spare you the math but the original TCP header option to communicate TCP window size with (that maximum of 65.535) just wasn't big enough any more. So they came up with a multiplication factor.

I just woke up so I hope I got the details right.

These are a lot of questions and even though I no TCP specialist, I'll have a go at it. There's much more detail to be found in the TCP/IP guide

1. MSS is not per definition limited to 1460, but it's a nice fit to Ethernet networks. Standard Ethernet uses frames with up to 1500 octets (bytes if you wish) of payload. Subtract the headers for Ethernet, IP and TCP and you'll get to something like 1460. You can go larger with MSS, but that could result in fragmentation in the lower layers (IP in this case), hurting performance.
2. The unscaled TCP window size it is 65.535. It has no relation to the MSS. The MSS is related to the transport of data over the network, using the services of the IP layer. The window size has to do with the sending and receiving hosts themselves. How many resources (memory) can they spend on this TCP session for storing data for retransmission and handing off to the receiving application.
3. TCP windos window scaling is a solution to the problem of growing network speeds. I'll spare you the math but the original TCP header option to communicate TCP window size with (that maximum of 65.535) just wasn't big enough any more. So they came up with a multiplication factor.

I just woke up so I hope I got the details right.

These are a lot of questions and even though I no TCP specialist, I'll have a go at it. There's much more detail to be found in the TCP/IP guide

1. MSS is not per definition limited to 1460, but it's a nice fit to Ethernet networks. Standard Ethernet uses frames with up to 1500 octets (bytes if you wish) of payload. Subtract the headers for Ethernet, IP and TCP and you'll get to something like 1460. You can go larger with MSS, but that could result in fragmentation in the lower layers (IP in this case), hurting performance.
2. The unscaled TCP window size is 65.535. It has no relation to the MSS. The MSS is related to the transport of data over the network, using the services of the IP layer. The window size has to do with the sending and receiving hosts themselves. How many resources (memory) can they spend on this TCP session for storing data for retransmission and handing off to the receiving application.
3. TCP window scaling is a solution to the problem of growing network speeds. I'll spare you the math but the original TCP header option to communicate TCP window size with (that maximum of 65.535) just wasn't big enough any more. So they came up with a multiplication factor.

I just woke up so I hope I got the details right.