Normally the socket buffers are static (either derived from global
defaults or set with setsockopt) and do not adapt to real network
conditions. Two things happen: a) your socket buffers are too small
and you can't reach the full potential of the network between both
hosts; b) your socket buffers are too big and you waste a lot of
kernel memory for data just sitting around.
With automatic TCP send and receive socket buffers we can start with a
small buffer and quickly grow it in parallel with the TCP congestion
window to match real network conditions.
FreeBSD has a default 32K send socket buffer. This supports a maximal
transfer rate of only slightly more than 2Mbit/s on a 100ms RTT
trans-continental link. Or at 200ms just above 1Mbit/s. With TCP send
buffer auto scaling and the default values below it supports 20Mbit/s
at 100ms and 10Mbit/s at 200ms. That's an improvement of factor 10, or
1000%. For the receive side it looks slightly better with a default of
64K buffer size.
New sysctls are:
net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_auto=1 (enabled)
net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_inc=8192 (8K, step size)
net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_max=262144 (256K, growth limit)
net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_auto=1 (enabled)
net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_inc=16384 (16K, step size)
net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_max=262144 (256K, growth limit)
Tested by: many (on HEAD and RELENG_6)
Approved by: re
MFC after: 1 month
6741ecf595