[e2e] Are Packet Trains / Packet Bursts a Problem in TCP?

[rick jones]

> It's obvious that doing hardware TSO for say an 8 K data chunk, i.e. 5
> segments, provides great savings in terms of CPU cycles and I/O bus
> utilization spent on transmitting TCP streams.  But what is the 
> performance
> gain for going up from 8 K / 5 segment TSO to 64 K / 44 segment bursts,
> knowing that bursts that large clearly coudl be a double-edged sword?

One of those wonderful "it depends" sorts of things.  If you have 
zero-copy, the diminishing returns are father out than if there is 
still a non-trivial per-byte cost (eg from copying from user to 
kernel).  CKO and zero-copy address per-byte costs, TSO the per-packet.

And as the TSO offload is increased, ACK processing becomes a greater 
and greater percentage of the CPU overhead, which gives rise to 
incentives for ACK avoidance heuristics :)

> In other words, how large the TSO bursts could be considered tolerable 
> and
> justified - roughly where should we draw the line?

There is no line - at least not in the sense that we can say 
categorically "N burst good, M burst bad" because it will vary with the 
conditions. I'm content to let the admin have control over the maximum 
size of the TSO offload, the routers drop packets and/or set ECN, and a 
congestion control algorithm to keep things from melting and leave it 
at that.

rick jones
there is no rest for the wicked, yet the virtuous have no pillows