I'm hoping someone out there can help me with a rather annoying TCP/IP problem that is proving to be a big stumbling block in the work I am doing at present.

I am running a private network of machines, each with at least a PIII 800 MHz processor in. I am sending a lot of messages around my network using TCP/IP. My transmission times are never greater than 1 second, even under my heaviest load.

But TCP/IP is taking 16 minutes to lose a pipe. I assume this is because it is attempting to retransmit my message for this amount of time and all attempts are unsuccessful. However, this 16 minutes is far too long for my needs, I would like to reduce this time to about 10 seconds if possible.

Does anyone have any idea how I can go about this?

I'll apologise now if theabove seems confusing or I haven't supplied you with enough information, I'm fairly new to all this but I will be happy to supply any more details if required.

Cheers.