Techniques for providing reliable transport of data across a network between a server on a server device and a client on a client device include a process on the client device which determines a number of packets to be sent by the server device without an acknowledgement message from the client device. The number of packets is based on considerations of network problems. A data packet sent to a server device includes a first field holding data indicating the number of packets to be sent by the server device without an acknowledgement message from the client device. Accordingly, a transport layer process on a client device to download large amounts of content from a stateless transport layer process on a server device, substantially reducing the computational resources consumed by the server device in serving thousands of clients.