• mfreemon@cloudflare.com's avatar
    tcp: enforce receive buffer memory limits by allowing the tcp window to shrink · b650d953
    mfreemon@cloudflare.com authored
    Under certain circumstances, the tcp receive buffer memory limit
    set by autotuning (sk_rcvbuf) is increased due to incoming data
    packets as a result of the window not closing when it should be.
    This can result in the receive buffer growing all the way up to
    tcp_rmem[2], even for tcp sessions with a low BDP.
    
    To reproduce:  Connect a TCP session with the receiver doing
    nothing and the sender sending small packets (an infinite loop
    of socket send() with 4 bytes of payload with a sleep of 1 ms
    in between each send()).  This will cause the tcp receive buffer
    to grow all the way up to tcp_rmem[2].
    
    As a result, a host can have individual tcp sessions with receive
    buffers of size tcp_rmem[2], and the host itself can reach tcp_mem
    limits, causing the host to go into tcp memory pressure mode.
    
    The fundamental issue is the relationship between the granularity
    of the window scaling factor and the number of byte ACKed back
    to the sender.  This problem has previously been identified in
    RFC 7323, appendix F [1].
    
    The Linux kernel currently adheres to never shrinking the window.
    
    In addition to the overallocation of memory mentioned above, the
    current behavior is functionally incorrect, because once tcp_rmem[2]
    is reached when no remediations remain (i.e. tcp collapse fails to
    free up any more memory and there are no packets to prune from the
    out-of-order queue), the receiver will drop in-window packets
    resulting in retransmissions and an eventual timeout of the tcp
    session.  A receive buffer full condition should instead result
    in a zero window and an indefinite wait.
    
    In practice, this problem is largely hidden for most flows.  It
    is not applicable to mice flows.  Elephant flows can send data
    fast enough to "overrun" the sk_rcvbuf limit (in a single ACK),
    triggering a zero window.
    
    But this problem does show up for other types of flows.  Examples
    are websockets and other type of flows that send small amounts of
    data spaced apart slightly in time.  In these cases, we directly
    encounter the problem described in [1].
    
    RFC 7323, section 2.4 [2], says there are instances when a retracted
    window can be offered, and that TCP implementations MUST ensure
    that they handle a shrinking window, as specified in RFC 1122,
    section 4.2.2.16 [3].  All prior RFCs on the topic of tcp window
    management have made clear that sender must accept a shrunk window
    from the receiver, including RFC 793 [4] and RFC 1323 [5].
    
    This patch implements the functionality to shrink the tcp window
    when necessary to keep the right edge within the memory limit by
    autotuning (sk_rcvbuf).  This new functionality is enabled with
    the new sysctl: net.ipv4.tcp_shrink_window
    
    Additional information can be found at:
    https://blog.cloudflare.com/unbounded-memory-usage-by-tcp-for-receive-buffers-and-how-we-fixed-it/
    
    [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7323#appendix-F
    [2] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7323#section-2.4
    [3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1122#page-91
    [4] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc793
    [5] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1323Signed-off-by: default avatarMike Freemon <mfreemon@cloudflare.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarEric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    b650d953
sysctl_net_ipv4.c 40.2 KB