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Date:      Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:36:45 +0000
From:      Rui Paulo <rpaulo@fnop.net>
To:        David Malone <dwmalone@maths.tcd.ie>
Cc:        freebsd-net@freebsd.org, Kevin Oberman <oberman@es.net>
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD Window updates
Message-ID:  <457EB70C-A3E6-4B3A-A707-CDE62FD2E8E0@fnop.net>
In-Reply-To: <200811271403.aa55110@walton.maths.tcd.ie>
References:  <200811271403.aa55110@walton.maths.tcd.ie>

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On 27 Nov 2008, at 14:03, David Malone wrote:

> I was looking at some tcpdumps from a FreeBSD box receiving a TCP
> stream with someone yesterday and noticed that it seemed to be
> generating quite a lot of dupliacte acks. Looking more carefully,
> we noticed that the duplicates were actually window updates. The
> code for sending window updates can be found in:
>
> 	http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/netinet/tcp_output.c?annot
> ate=1.157
>
> around lines 541-565. It seems that we generate a window update if
> the available buffer space changes by more than two packets, or if
> it changes by more than half the buffer size. This is probably a
> little aggressive, and in some cases seems to result in bursts of
> window updates that look like they should be batched. I wonder if
> it would make sense to not do a window update if a delayed ack is
> scheduled? It might even be possible to do them as a delayed ack
> without causing problems.

Yes, this makes sense. Probably this is a bug since 4.4BSD-Lite.

> I note that there is at least one PR mentioning we generate many
> window updates:
>
> 	http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=116335
>
> I also wonder if it might cause non-FreeBSD senders to back off,
> we are careful not to retransmit if we get window updates (see
>
> 	http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/netinet/tcp_input.c?annota
> te=1.392
>
> about line 1836, but other OSes might not be and that might degrade
> our performance when receiving from a non-FreeBSD sender.


So, from what I understand, we do back off and that implies we are  
losing performance in the FreeBSD to FreeBSD case, right?

--
Rui Paulo




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