I have an application that uses the connect(2) call to establish a TCP connection. When I run this on Fedora 14, the connect() call times out in about 23 seconds. On other (older) versions of Fedora, the timeout is much longer.

From the documentation I could find, net.ipv4.tcp_syn_retries should control this. The documentation says the default value is 5 which should result in about 180 seconds. I checked the value of net.ipv4.tcp_syn_retries on my older and newer (Fedora 14) machines, and it is 5 for all of them, yet the timeout is much shorter on Fedora 14. What other parameters should I check to find out why the timeout has gotten much shorter?