• Eric Dumazet's avatar
    tcp: fix cwnd limited checking to improve congestion control · e114a710
    Eric Dumazet authored
    Yuchung discovered tcp_is_cwnd_limited() was returning false in
    slow start phase even if the application filled the socket write queue.
    
    All congestion modules take into account tcp_is_cwnd_limited()
    before increasing cwnd, so this behavior limits slow start from
    probing the bandwidth at full speed.
    
    The problem is that even if write queue is full (aka we are _not_
    application limited), cwnd can be under utilized if TSO should auto
    defer or TCP Small queues decided to hold packets.
    
    So the in_flight can be kept to smaller value, and we can get to the
    point tcp_is_cwnd_limited() returns false.
    
    With TCP Small Queues and FQ/pacing, this issue is more visible.
    
    We fix this by having tcp_cwnd_validate(), which is supposed to track
    such things, take into account unsent_segs, the number of segs that we
    are not sending at the moment due to TSO or TSQ, but intend to send
    real soon. Then when we are cwnd-limited, remember this fact while we
    are processing the window of ACKs that comes back.
    
    For example, suppose we have a brand new connection with cwnd=10; we
    are in slow start, and we send a flight of 9 packets. By the time we
    have received ACKs for all 9 packets we want our cwnd to be 18.
    We implement this by setting tp->lsnd_pending to 9, and
    considering ourselves to be cwnd-limited while cwnd is less than
    twice tp->lsnd_pending (2*9 -> 18).
    
    This makes tcp_is_cwnd_limited() more understandable, by removing
    the GSO/TSO kludge, that tried to work around the issue.
    
    Note the in_flight parameter can be removed in a followup cleanup
    patch.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarEric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarNeal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarYuchung Cheng <ycheng@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    e114a710
tcp.h 48.4 KB