Re: Raise initial congestion window size / speedup slow start?

From: Ed W
Date: Wed Jul 14 2010 - 14:48:42 EST


On 14/07/2010 19:15, David Miller wrote:
From: Bill Davidsen<davidsen@xxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 11:21:15 -0400

You may have to go into /proc/sys/net/core and crank up the
rmem_* settings, depending on your distribution.
You should never, ever, have to touch the various networking sysctl
values to get good performance in any normal setup. If you do, it's a
bug, report it so we can fix it.

Just checking the basics here because I don't think this is a bug so much as a, less common installation that differs from the "normal" case.

- When we create a tcp connection we always start with tcp slow start
- This sets the congestion window to effectively 4 packets?
- This applies in both directions?
- Remote sender responds to my hypothetical http request with the first 4 packets of data
- We need to wait one RTT for the ack to come back and now we can send the next 8 packets,
- Wait for the next ack and at 16 packets we are now moving at a sensible fraction of the bandwidth delay product?

So just to be clear:
- We don't seem to have any user-space tuning knobs to influence this right now?
- In this age of short attention spans, a couple of extra seconds between clicking something and it responding is worth optimising (IMHO)
- I think I need to take this to netdev, but anyone else with any ideas happy to hear them?

Thanks

Ed W
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