Enhanced Akamai Protocol is a set of advanced routing and transport optimizations that increase the performance and reliability of your website or application.

How it works

Basically, it works to reduce timeouts due to data packet loss. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that's used to transfer data across the internet can quickly increase the number of packets directed to the congestion window. The congestion window is a TCP state variable that limits the amount of data TCP can send into a network before receiving an acknowledgment (ACK). Initially, this congestion window may be small and data packets can be delayed. If there's a long enough delay, packets can become lost and requests will repeatedly time out.

To help with this, Enhanced ​Akamai​ Protocol:

• Increases the size of the congestion window. It eliminates the slow-start algorithm that the TCP state variable uses for the congestion window. So, you can send an entire response (broken into more packets) at once.
• Uses "duplicate ACK". This is a dual acknowledgment that's sent by the receiver if a data packet is lost. It forces quicker retransmission of lost packets.

How to enable it

This behavior is automatically included in a new property for all of the products it supports. It doesn't include any options. You just need to make sure it's in your property to enable it.

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You can significantly reduce your property's performance if you remove this behavior.