Rate based control is a promising way to achieve an efficient packet transmission especially in high speed packet switching networks where round trip delay is much larger than packet transmission time. Although inappropriate tuning for the parameters, increasing and decreasing factors, of the rate control function causes the performance degradation, most of the previous works so far have not studied the effect of the parameters on the performance. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the rate control parameters on the throughput under the condition that the packet loss probability is kept below a specific value, say 10-6. For this purpose, we build a queueing model and carry out a transient analysis to examine the dynamic behavior of the queue length at an intermediate node in a high speed network suffering from large propagation delay. Numerical examples exploit the optimal value of the parameters when one or two source-destination pairs transmit packets. We also discuss the effect of the propagation delay on the performance. Our model can be applicable to investigate the performance of various kinds of rate-based congestion control when the relation between the congestion measure and the rate control mechanism is given explicitly.