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Date:      Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:08:35 -0800
From:      Sean Hamilton <sh@bel.bc.ca>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   NUMA support; tweaking TCP for GPRS
Message-ID:  <20091113020835.GE12442@visor.slugabed.org>

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Greetings -hackers,

I have two unrelated questions.

First, what is the status of NUMA support in FreeBSD? Is
there a performance penalty on Nehalem-class systems,
compared with Linux, which advertises NUMA awareness? Google
seems to turn up very little on this subject.

Second, I am using a FreeBSD server to talk to equipment
which has a GPRS internet connection. This is fairly high
latency (approximately one second RTT) and is prone to
bursts of packet loss, or bursts of extremely high latency
-- perhaps up to a minute. These intervals cause many
retransmissions, which I presume is a good strategy over the
internet, but not so good for GPRS.

For my application, latency is mostly irrelevant. However,
data over GPRS is very expensive, so I would like to reduce
as much as possible the number of TCP retransmissions made
on the FreeBSD side, possibly at the expense of latency.

So, I am looking for suggestions on how to achieve this, via
sysctl, setsockopt, etc. There seems to be a lot of
literature regarding TCP tuning, but usually the focus is on
improving performance, not reducing network traffic. The
"rexmit_min" and "rexmit_sop" sysctls mentioned in tcp(4)
seem interesting, but it's not clear to me exactly how they
might be adjusted for this purpose.

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Sean Hamilton <sh@bel.bc.ca>



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