Lately, we've become aware of a TCP connection issue that is mostly limited to mac and Linux users who browse our websites.

From the user perspective, it presents itself as a really long connection time to our websites (>11 seconds).

We've managed to track down the technical signature of this problem, but can't figure out why it is happening or how to fix it.

Basically, what is happening is that the client's machine is sending the SYN packet to establish the TCP connection and the web server receives it, but does not respond with the SYN/ACK packet. After the client has sent many SYN packets, the server finally responds with a SYN/ACK packet and everything is fine for the remainder of the connection.

And, of course, the kicker to the problem: it is intermittent and does not happen all the time (though it does happen between 10-30% of the time)

We are using Fedora 12 Linux as the OS and Nginx as the web server.