Yandex Cloud
Search
Contact UsGet started
  • Pricing
  • Customer Stories
  • Documentation
  • Blog
  • All Services
  • System Status
    • Featured
    • Infrastructure & Network
    • Data Platform
    • Containers
    • Developer tools
    • Serverless
    • Security
    • Monitoring & Resources
    • AI Studio
    • Business tools
  • All Solutions
    • By industry
    • By use case
    • Economics and Pricing
    • Security
    • Technical Support
    • Start testing with double trial credits
    • Cloud credits to scale your IT product
    • Gateway to Russia
    • Cloud for Startups
    • Center for Technologies and Society
    • Yandex Cloud Partner program
  • Pricing
  • Customer Stories
  • Documentation
  • Blog
© 2025 Direct Cursus Technology L.L.C.
Service page
Yandex Virtual Private Cloud
Documentation
Yandex Virtual Private Cloud
  • Getting started
    • Service resource interdependencies
    • Yandex Cloud network overview
    • Cloud networks and subnets
    • Cloud resource addresses
    • Routing
    • Security groups
    • Gateways
    • Service connections
    • Monitoring network connections
    • Public IP address ranges
    • MTU and MSS
    • DHCP settings
    • Software-accelerated network
    • Quotas and limits
  • DDoS Protection
  • Access management
  • Pricing policy
  • Terraform reference
  • Audit Trails events
  • Release notes
  • FAQ
  1. Concepts
  2. MTU and MSS

MTU and TCP MSS

Written by
Yandex Cloud
Improved by
Dmitry K.
Updated at June 10, 2025

Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) is the maximum data packet size, in bytes, transmittable over a network segment.

Generally, the MTU is 1500 bytes; however, MTUs may vary in different networks the packets are transmitted through. For example, when using Yandex DDoS Protection or VPN tunnels, the MTU value should be lower to avoid losing packets. Packet loss due to MTU issues may look like an unresponsive TCP session, such as during a TLS handshake or SSH access.

There are two ways to impact the size of transmitted packets:

  1. Set the MTU through your VM interface: this will affect all types of transmitted packets.
  2. Set the TCP MSS. The TCP MSS can only be set for certain packets, for example, those transmitted through the default route.

Alert

When you enable DDoS Protection, you should set the MTU to 1450 bytes if you need to limit the size of all packets, and the TCP MSS to 1410 if you only need to limit the size of TCP packets.

You can learn how to configure the MTU for various platforms in Yandex Cloud here.

If you use VPN tunnels, reduce the MTU and TCP MSS values to the size of the tunnel headers and TCP headers, respectively.

Use casesUse cases

  • Secure user access to cloud resources based on WireGuard VPN

Was the article helpful?

Previous
Public IP address ranges
Next
DHCP settings
© 2025 Direct Cursus Technology L.L.C.