I experienced the very same problem but with window size going all the
way down to just a few bytes (14 bytes). dump files available upon
requests :)
Ion, how were you able to reproduce the issue ? Can the same type of
traffice always reproduce the issue or is it more intermittent ?
Best regards,
Guillaume.
John Heffner wrote:
On Sep 1, 2005, at 6:53 PM, Ion Badulescu wrote:
A few minutes later it has finally caught up to present time and it
starts receiving smaller packets containing real-time data. The TCP
window is still 16534 at this point.
[tcpdump output removed]
This is where things start going bad. The window starts shrinking
from 15340 all the way down to 2355 over the course of 0.3 seconds.
Notice the many duplicate acks that serve no purpose (there are no
lost packets and the tcpdump is taken on the receiver so there is no
packets/acks crossed in flight).
I have an idea why this is going on. Packets are pre-allocated by the
driver to be a max packet size, so when you send small packets, it
wastes a lot of memory. Currently Linux uses the packets at the
beginning of a connection to make a guess at how best to advertise its
window so as not to overflow the socket's memory bounds. Since you
start out with big segments then go to small ones, this is defeating
that mechanism. It's actually documented in the comments in
tcp_input.c. :)
* The scheme does not work when sender sends good segments opening
* window and then starts to feed us spagetti. But it should work
* in common situations. Otherwise, we have to rely on queue collapsing.
If you overflow the socket's memory bound, it ends up calling
tcp_clamp_window(). (I'm not sure this is really the right thing to
do here before trying to collapse the queue.) If the receiving
application doesn't fall too far behind, it might help you to set a
much larger receiver buffer.
-John
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--
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Guillaume Autran
Senior Software Engineer
MRV Communications, Inc.
Tel: (978) 952-4932 office
E-mail: gautran@xxxxxxx
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