When checking whether a DATA chunk fits into the estimated rwnd a
full sizeof(struct sk_buff) is added to the needed chunk size. This
quickly exhausts the available rwnd space and leads to packets being
sent which are much below the PMTU limit. This can lead to much worse
performance.
The reason for this behaviour was to avoid putting too much memory
pressure on the receiver. The concept is not completely irational
because a Linux receiver does in fact clone an skb for each DATA chunk
delivered. However, Linux also reserves half the available socket
buffer space for data structures therefore usage of it is already
accounted for.
When proposing to change this the last time it was noted that this
behaviour was introduced to solve a performance issue caused by rwnd
overusage in combination with small DATA chunks.
Trying to reproduce this I found that with the sk_buff overhead removed,
the performance would improve significantly unless socket buffer limits
are increased.
The following numbers have been gathered using a patched iperf
supporting SCTP over a live 1 Gbit ethernet network. The -l option
was used to limit DATA chunk sizes. The numbers listed are based on
the average of 3 test runs each. Default values have been used for
sk_(r|w)mem.
Chunk
Size Unpatched No Overhead
-------------------------------------
4 15.2 Kbit [!] 12.2 Mbit [!]
8 35.8 Kbit [!] 26.0 Mbit [!]
16 95.5 Kbit [!] 54.4 Mbit [!]
32 106.7 Mbit 102.3 Mbit
64 189.2 Mbit 188.3 Mbit
128 331.2 Mbit 334.8 Mbit
256 537.7 Mbit 536.0 Mbit
512 766.9 Mbit 766.6 Mbit
1024 810.1 Mbit 808.6 Mbit
Signed-off-by: Thomas Graf <tgraf@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
a76c0adf60