From c96fd3d461fa495400df24be3b3b66f0e0b152f9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Ilpo Järvinen Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 11:36:37 -0700 Subject: [TCP]: Enable SACK enhanced FRTO (RFC4138) by default MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Most of the description that follows comes from my mail to netdev (some editing done): Main obstacle to FRTO use is its deployment as it has to be on the sender side where as wireless link is often the receiver's access link. Take initiative on behalf of unlucky receivers and enable it by default in future Linux TCP senders. Also IETF seems to interested in advancing FRTO from experimental [1]. How does FRTO help? =================== FRTO detects spurious RTOs and avoids a number of unnecessary retransmissions and a couple of other problems that can arise due to incorrect guess made at RTO (i.e., that segments were lost when they actually got delayed which is likely to occur e.g. in wireless environments with link-layer retransmission). Though FRTO cannot prevent the first (potentially unnecessary) retransmission at RTO, I suspect that it won't cost that much even if you have to pay for each bit (won't be that high percentage out of all packets after all :-)). However, usually when you have a spurious RTO, not only the first segment unnecessarily retransmitted but the *whole window*. It goes like this: all cumulative ACKs got delayed due to in-order delivery, then TCP will actually send 1.5*original cwnd worth of data in the RTO's slow-start when the delayed ACKs arrive (basically the original cwnd worth of it unnecessarily). In case one is interested in minimizing unnecessary retransmissions e.g. due to cost, those rexmissions must never see daylight. Besides, in the worst case the generated burst overloads the bottleneck buffers which is likely to significantly delay the further progress of the flow. In case of ll rexmissions, ACK compression often occurs at the same time making the burst very "sharp edged" (in that case TCP often loses most of the segments above high_seq => very bad performance too). When FRTO is enabled, those unnecessary retransmissions are fully avoided except for the first segment and the cwnd behavior after detected spurious RTO is determined by the response (one can tune that by sysctl). Basic version (non-SACK enhanced one), FRTO can fail to detect spurious RTO as spurious and falls back to conservative behavior. ACK lossage is much less significant than reordering, usually the FRTO can detect spurious RTO if at least 2 cumulative ACKs from original window are preserved (excluding the ACK that advances to high_seq). With SACK-enhanced version, the detection is quite robust. FRTO should remove the need to set a high lower bound for the RTO estimator due to delay spikes that occur relatively common in some environments (esp. in wireless/cellular ones). [1] http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tcpm/current/msg02862.html Signed-off-by: Ilpo Järvinen Signed-off-by: David S. Miller --- net/ipv4/tcp_input.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'net/ipv4') diff --git a/net/ipv4/tcp_input.c b/net/ipv4/tcp_input.c index 0feb10935be1..65b9f274a774 100644 --- a/net/ipv4/tcp_input.c +++ b/net/ipv4/tcp_input.c @@ -85,7 +85,7 @@ int sysctl_tcp_adv_win_scale __read_mostly = 2; int sysctl_tcp_stdurg __read_mostly; int sysctl_tcp_rfc1337 __read_mostly; int sysctl_tcp_max_orphans __read_mostly = NR_FILE; -int sysctl_tcp_frto __read_mostly; +int sysctl_tcp_frto __read_mostly = 2; int sysctl_tcp_frto_response __read_mostly; int sysctl_tcp_nometrics_save __read_mostly; -- cgit v1.2.3