From owner-freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Apr 20 14:43:09 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F2462106566C for ; Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:43:09 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from mark@pogo.org.uk) Received: from metheny.ijneb.com (unknown [IPv6:2001:ba8:0:1ba:214:22ff:feb1:2693]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 93A0E8FC17 for ; Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:43:09 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from mark@pogo.org.uk) Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] ident=mark) by metheny.ijneb.com with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Jnal1-0003km-2L; Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:43:07 +0100 Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:43:07 +0100 (BST) From: Mark Hills To: Peter Jeremy In-Reply-To: <20080420025010.GJ73016@server.vk2pj.dyndns.org> Message-ID: References: <20080420025010.GJ73016@server.vk2pj.dyndns.org> User-Agent: Alpine 1.10 (BSO 962 2008-03-14) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: 127.0.0.1 X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: mark@pogo.org.uk Cc: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Subject: Re: read() returns ETIMEDOUT on steady TCP connection X-BeenThere: freebsd-net@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Networking and TCP/IP with FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:43:10 -0000 On Sun, 20 Apr 2008, Peter Jeremy wrote: > Can you give some more detail about your hardware (speed, CPU, > available RAM, UP or SMP) and the application (roughly what does the > core of the code look like and is it single-threaded/multi-threaded > and/or multi-process). The current test is a Dell 2650, 2Gb, Quad Xeon with onboard bge. The application is single threaded, non-blocking multiplexed I/O based on poll(). It's relatively simple at its core -- read() from an inbound connection and write() to outbound sockets. >> As the number of outbound connections increases, the 'output drops' >> increases to around 10% of the total packets sent and maintains that ratio. >> There's no problems with network capacity. > > 'output drops' (ips_odropped) means that the kernel is unable to > buffer the write (no mbufs or send queue full). Userland should see > ENOBUFS unless the error was triggered by a fragmentation request. The app definitely isn't seeing ENOBUFS; this would be treated as a fatal condition and reported. > I can't explain the problem but it definitely looks like a resource > starvation issue within the kernel. I've traced the source of the ETIMEDOUT within the kernel to tcp_timer_rexmt() in tcp_timer.c: if (++tp->t_rxtshift > TCP_MAXRXTSHIFT) { tp->t_rxtshift = TCP_MAXRXTSHIFT; tcpstat.tcps_timeoutdrop++; tp = tcp_drop(tp, tp->t_softerror ? tp->t_softerror : ETIMEDOUT); goto out; } I'm new to FreeBSD, but it seems to implies that it's reaching a limit of a number of retransmits of sending ACKs on the TCP connection receiving the inbound data? But I checked this using tcpdump on the server and could see no retransmissions. As a test, I ran a simulation with the necessary changes to increase TCP_MAXRXTSHIFT (including adding appropriate entries to tcp_sync_backoff[] and tcp_backoff[]) and it appeared I was able to reduce the frequency of the problem occurring, but not to a usable level. With ACKs in mind, I took the test back to stock kernel and configuration, and went ahead with disabling sack on the server and the client which supplies the data (FreeBSD 6.1, not 7). This greatly reduced the 'duplicate acks' metric, but didn't fix the problem. The next step was to switch off delayed_ack as well, and I didn't see the problem for some hours on the test system at 850mbit output. But hasn't eliminated it, as it happened again. Perhaps someone with a greater knowledge can help to join the dots of all these symptoms? Mark