The way these initial values are derived is that the network traffic expected is from lots of connections. If the total number of active requests from the server are small, these values may be increased to allow more buffer area per connection. This increase will help improve performance for small numbers of connections as long as the aggregate TCP window space does not exceed other buffer areas. The following are typical problems that occur in a server environment. Exhaustion of switch pools due to use of large TCP windows.
Adapter queue overflows on non switch adapters.
Not enough NFS daemons or too small NFS socket size. Too small memory size. Some of these problems are explained in more details in later sections which are linked to the topic list above. There are other non network related problems that can also cause performance problems in server environments. Large numbers of storage devices to prevent bottlenecking on a subset.