Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 29 Mar 2006 20:47:49 -0500
From:      "Ashish Awasthi" <awasthi.ashish@gmail.com>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Packet drops and queue length upon bandwidth limiting in PF
Message-ID:  <5289d17a0603291747yc74f86al2f045efb95f13b6@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <5289d17a0603291736s2f05bb55m293e2ec32af8a3af@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <5289d17a0603291735u194807cbu853b438edc80049b@mail.gmail.com> <5289d17a0603291736s2f05bb55m293e2ec32af8a3af@mail.gmail.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hi friends,

I am a relative newbie, so please don't flame me if my question doesn't mak=
e
sense.

In a network experiment to determine appropriate length of router buffers, =
I
am using pfctl on FreeBSD 5.3 to limit the bandwidth to 100 Mbps on a 1 Gig
link and limit the queue to 240 packets, and I use iperf for sending out
data. Connection is maintained between two routers running FreeBSD 5.3,
connected by a 1 Gig link. I monitor on sender the pfctl and iperf
statisitcs.

As I see the iperf throughput go down from 94 Mbps to 50 Mbps and then rise
again in accordance with the classic sawtooth curve of TCP, it is clear tha=
t
there must have been a packet drop, but "pfctl -s -queue -v -v" at the
sender shows 0 losses and 0 drops. Moreover, the queue length as reported
never overflows. Even netstat shows 0 retransmissions!

I tried this with queue lengths of 50, 100, 240, 10 and 5. Only when queue
length is on the order of 5 or 10 do I see packet drops in pfctl report (an=
d
also retransmissions in the netstat report); however, since I have limited
the bandwidth and the outgoing traffic is shaped by this limitation, it is
clear that there must be some packet losses in other cases as well.

So, I tend to think that some other queueing is occuring apart from the
ALTQ, and drops are occuring there. If so, how can I obtain those
statistics?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Ashish



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?5289d17a0603291747yc74f86al2f045efb95f13b6>