minimum TCP retransmit timer

[Andrew Athan]

Is the minimum TCP retransmit timer in 2.6 still 200ms ?  We are running 
a gigabit networking environment, and experiencing some packet loss (I'm 
assuming due to noise).  Due to the high performance nature of our 
applications, a 200ms retransmit timer is just too long (from an 
application perspective).  Packet loss doesn't seem unacceptably high, 
it's just that when it does, 200ms delay is just too much.

I am toying with the idea of reducing the RTO value used by linux hosts 
in our network, as a way of reducing latency when errors do occur.  I'm 
assuming this may increase the number of unecessary retransmissions, but 
since we are at about 5% utilization on the network, that's probably 
ok.  However, I definitely want to avoid exciting other aspects of the 
TCP stack, such as slow start.

Can anyone comment on all of this?

Andrew Athan

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