Embodiments of the present invention address deficiencies of the art in respect to TCP processing and provide a novel and non-obvious method, system and computer program product for selectively accelerating TCP connections. In one embodiment of the invention, a method of selectively accelerating TCP connections in TCP/IP based inter-process communications can be provided. The method can include establishing a TCP connection for TCP/IP inter-process communications, observing a block size for the TCP connection, and switching between TCP/IP processing in a host processor and TCP/IP processing in a TOE in a network adapter coupled to the host processor based upon the observed block size exceeding a threshold value.