NFNN2, 20th-21st June 2005

National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh

TCP Tuning Techniques for

High-Speed Wide-Area Networks

Brian L. Tierney

Distributed Systems Department

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

http://gridmon.dl.ac.uk/nfnn/

Wizard Gap

Slide from
Matt Mathis, PSC
Brian L. Tierney Slide: 2

1
 Today’s Talk

 This talk will cover:

 Information needed to be a “wizard”
 Current work being done so you don’t have to be a
wizard

 Outline
 TCP Overview
 TCP Tuning Techniques (focus on Linux)
 TCP Issues
 Network Monitoring Tools
 Current TCP Research

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 3

How TCP works: A very short overview

 Congestion window (CWND) = the number of packets the

sender is allowed to send
 The larger the window size, the higher the throughput
 Throughput = Window size / Round-trip Time
 TCP Slow start
 exponentially increase the congestion window size until a packet is
lost
 this gets a rough estimate of the optimal congestion window
size
packet loss
timeout
CWND
slow start:
exponential congestion retransmit:
increase avoidance: slow start
linear again
increase

time
Brian L. Tierney Slide: 4

2
 TCP Overview

 Congestion avoidance
 additive increase: starting from the rough estimate, linearly
increase the congestion window size to probe for additional
available bandwidth
 multiplicative decrease: cut congestion window size aggressively if
a timeout occurs

packet loss
timeout
CWND
slow start:
exponential congestion retransmit:
increase avoidance: slow start
linear again
increase

time

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 5

TCP Overview
 Fast Retransmit: retransmit after 3 duplicate acks (got 3 additional
packets without getting the one you are waiting for)
 this prevents expensive timeouts
 no need to go into “slow start” again
 At steady state, CWND oscillates around the optimal window size
 With a retransmission timeout, slow start is triggered again

packet loss
timeout
CWND
slow start:
exponential congestion retransmit:
increase avoidance: slow start
linear again
increase

time

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 6

3
 Terminology

 The term “Network Throughput” is vague and should be

avoided
 Capacity: link speed
 Narrow Link: link with the lowest capacity along a path
 Capacity of the end-to-end path = capacity of the narrow link
 Utilized bandwidth: current traffic load
 Available bandwidth: capacity – utilized bandwidth
 Tight Link: link with the least available bandwidth in a path
 Achievable bandwidth: includes protocol and host issues

45 Mbps 10 Mbps 100 Mbps 45 Mbps

source sink

Narrow Link
Tight Link
Brian L. Tierney Slide: 7

More Terminology

 RTT: Round-trip time

 Bandwidth*Delay Product = BDP
 The number of bytes in flight to fill the entire path
 Example: 100 Mbps path; ping shows a 75 ms RTT
BDP = 100 * 0.075 / 2 = 3.75 Mbits (470 KB)
 LFN: Long Fat Networks
 A network with a large BDP

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 8

4
 TCP Performance Tuning Issues

 Getting good TCP performance over high-latency

high-bandwidth networks is not easy!
 You must keep the pipe full, and the size of the
pipe is directly related to the network latency
 Example: from LBNL (Berkeley, CA) to ANL (near
Chicago, IL), the narrow link is 1000 Mbits/sec, and the
one-way latency is 25ms
 Need (1000 / 8) * .025 sec = 3.125 MBytes of data “in
flight” to fill the pipe

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 9

Setting the TCP buffer sizes

 It is critical to use the optimal TCP send and receive

socket buffer sizes for the link you are using.
 Recommended size = 2 x Bandwidth Delay Product (BDP)
 if too small, the TCP window will never fully open up
 if too large, the sender can overrun the receiver, and the TCP
window will shut down
 Default TCP buffer sizes are way too small for this type of
network
 default TCP send/receive buffers are typically 64 KB
 with default TCP buffers, you can only get a small % of the
available bandwidth!

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 10

5
 Importance of TCP Tuning
Throughput (Mbits/sec)
Tuned for Tuned for Tuned for
300 LAN WAN Both
264 264

200
152
112 112
100
44

64KB TCP 512 KB

Buffers TCP Buffers

LAN (rtt = 1ms)

WAN (rtt = 50ms)
Brian L. Tierney Slide: 11

TCP Buffer Tuning: System

 Need to adjust system max TCP buffer
 Example: in Linux (2.4 and 2.6) add the entries below to the file
/etc/sysctl.conf, and then run "sysctl -p”

# increase TCP max buffer size

net.core.rmem_max = 16777216
net.core.wmem_max = 16777216
# increase Linux autotuning TCP buffer limits
# min, default, and max number of bytes to use
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 16777216
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 65536 16777216

 Similar changes needed for other Unix OS’s

 For more info, see: http://dsd.lbl.gov/TCP-Tuning/

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 12

6
 TCP Buffer Tuning: Application
 Must adjust buffer size in your applications:
int skt, int sndsize = 2 * 1024 * 1024;
err = setsockopt(skt, SOL_SOCKET, SO_SNDBUF,
(char *)&sndsize,(int)sizeof(sndsize));
and/or
err = setsockopt(skt, SOL_SOCKET, SO_RCVBUF,
(char *)&sndsize,(int)sizeof(sndsize));

 It’s a good idea to check the following:

err = getsockopt(skt, SOL_SOCKET, SO_RCVBUF,
(char *)&sockbufsize, &size);
If (size != sndsize)
printf(stderr, “Warning: requested TCP buffer of %d,
but only got %d \n”, sndsize, size);

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 13

Determining the Buffer Size

 The optimal buffer size is twice the bandwidth*delay

product of the link:
buffer size = 2 * bandwidth * delay
 The ping program can be used to get the delay
 e.g.: >ping -s 1500 lxplus.cern.ch
1500 bytes from lxplus012.cern.ch: icmp_seq=0. time=175. ms
1500 bytes from lxplus012.cern.ch: icmp_seq=1. time=176. ms
1500 bytes from lxplus012.cern.ch: icmp_seq=2. time=175. ms

 pipechar or pathrate can be used to get the bandwidth of

the slowest hop in your path. (see next slides)
 Since ping gives the round trip time (RTT), this formula
can be used instead of the previous one:
buffer size = bandwidth * RTT

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 14

7
 Buffer Size Example
 ping time = 50 ms
 Narrow link = 500 Mbps (62 Mbytes/sec)
 e.g.: the end-to-end network consists of all 1000 BT
ethernet and OC-12 (622 Mbps)
 TCP buffers should be:
 .05 sec * 62 = 3.1 Mbytes

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 15

Sample Buffer Sizes

 UK to...
 UK (RTT = 5 ms, narrow link = 1000 Mbps) : 625 KB
 Europe: (RTT = 25 ms, narrow link = 500 Mbps): 1.56 MB
 US: (RTT = 150 ms, narrow link = 500 Mbps): 9.4 MB
 Japan: (RTT = 260, narrow link = 150 Mbps): 4.9 MB

 Note: default buffer size is usually only 64 KB, and default

maximum buffer size for is only 256KB
 Linux Autotuning default max = 128 KB;
 10-150 times too small!

 Home DSL, UK to US (RTT = 150, narrow link = 1 Mbps): 19 KB

 Default buffers are OK.

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 16

8
 More Problems: TCP congestion control

Path =
LBL to
CERN
(Geneva)
OC-3, (in
2000), RTT
= 150 ms

average
BW =
30 Mbps

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 17

Work-around: Use Parallel Streams

RTT = 70 ms

graph from Tom Dunigan, ORNL

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 18

9
 Tuned Buffers vs. Parallel Steams

Throughput (Mbits/sec)
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
no tuning tuned 10 tuned
TCP parallel TCP
buffers streams, buffers, 3
no tuning parallel
streams

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 19

Parallel Streams Issues

 Potentially unfair
 Places more load
on the end hosts
 But they are
necessary when
you don’t have root
access, and can’t
convince the
sysadmin to
increase the max
TCP buffers
graph from Tom Dunigan, ORNL

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 20

10
 NFNN2, 20th-21st June 2005
National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh

Network Monitoring Tools

http://gridmon.dl.ac.uk/nfnn/

traceroute
>traceroute pcgiga.cern.ch
traceroute to pcgiga.cern.ch (192.91.245.29), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 ir100gw-r2.lbl.gov (131.243.2.1) 0.49 ms 0.26 ms 0.23 ms
2 er100gw.lbl.gov (131.243.128.5) 0.68 ms 0.54 ms 0.54 ms
3 198.129.224.5 (198.129.224.5) 1.00 ms *d9* 1.29 ms
4 lbl2-ge-lbnl.es.net (198.129.224.2) 0.47 ms 0.59 ms 0.53 ms
5 snv-lbl-oc48.es.net (134.55.209.5) 57.88 ms 56.62 ms 61.33 ms
6 chi-s-snv.es.net (134.55.205.102) 50.57 ms 49.96 ms 49.84 ms
7 ar1-chicago-esnet.cern.ch (198.124.216.73) 50.74 ms 51.15 ms 50.96
ms
8 cernh9-pos100.cern.ch (192.65.184.34) 175.63 ms 176.05 ms 176.05
ms
9 cernh4.cern.ch (192.65.185.4) 175.92 ms 175.72 ms 176.09 ms
10 pcgiga.cern.ch (192.91.245.29) 175.58 ms 175.44 ms 175.96 ms

Can often learn about the network from the router names:
ge = Gigabit Ethernet
oc48 = 2.4 Gbps (oc3 = 155 Mbps, oc12=622 Mbps)

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 22

11
 Iperf
 iperf : very nice tool for measuring end-to-end TCP/UDP performance
 http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/
 Can be quite intrusive to the network
 Example:
 Server: iperf -s -w 2M
 Client: iperf -c hostname -i 2 -t 20 -l 128K -w 2M
Client connecting to hostname
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0- 2.0 sec 66.0 MBytes 275 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 2.0- 4.0 sec 107 MBytes 451 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 4.0- 6.0 sec 106 MBytes 446 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 6.0- 8.0 sec 107 MBytes 443 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 8.0-10.0 sec 106 MBytes 447 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 10.0-12.0 sec 106 MBytes 446 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 12.0-14.0 sec 107 MBytes 450 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 14.0-16.0 sec 106 MBytes 445 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 16.0-24.3 sec 58.8 MBytes 59.1 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 0.0-24.6 sec 871 MBytes 297 Mbits/sec

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 23

pathrate / pathload

 Nice tools from Georgia Tech:

 pathrate: measures the capacity of the narrow link
 pathload: measures the available bandwidth

 Both work pretty well.

 pathrate can take a long time (up to 20 minutes)
 These tools attempt to be non-intrusive
 Open Source; available from:
 http://www.pathrate.org/

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 24

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 pipechar

 Tool to measure hop-by-hop available bandwidth,

capacity, and congestion
 Takes 1-2 minutes to measure an 8 hop path
 client-side only tool: puts very little load on the network
(about 100 Kbits/sec)
 But not always accurate
 Results affected by host speed
 Hard to measure links faster than host interface
 Results after a slow hop typically not accurate, for example, if
the first hop is a wireless link, and all other hops are 100 BT or
faster, then results are not accurate
 Available from: http://dsd.lbl.gov/NCS/
 part of the netest package

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 25

pipechar output

dpsslx04.lbl.gov(59)>pipechar firebird.ccs.ornl.gov
PipeChar statistics: 82.61% reliable
From localhost: 827.586 Mbps GigE (1020.4638 Mbps)
1: ir100gw-r2.lbl.gov (131.243.2.1 )
| 1038.492 Mbps GigE <11.2000% BW used>
2: er100gw.lbl.gov (131.243.128.5)
| 1039.246 Mbps GigE <11.2000% BW used>
3: lbl2-ge-lbnl.es.net (198.129.224.2)
| 285.646 Mbps congested bottleneck <71.2000% BW used>
4: snv-lbl-oc48.es.net (134.55.209.5)
| 9935.817 Mbps OC192 <94.0002% BW used>
5: orn-s-snv.es.net (134.55.205.121)
| 341.998 Mbps congested bottleneck <65.2175% BW used>
6: ornl-orn.es.net (134.55.208.62)
| 298.089 Mbps congested bottleneck <70.0007% BW used>
7: orgwy-ext.ornl.gov (192.31.96.225)
| 339.623 Mbps congested bottleneck <65.5502% BW used>
8: ornlgwy-ext.ens.ornl.gov (198.124.42.162)
| 232.005 Mbps congested bottleneck <76.6233% BW used>
9: ccsrtr.ccs.ornl.gov (160.91.0.66 )
| 268.651 Mbps GigE (1023.4655 Mbps)
10: firebird.ccs.ornl.gov (160.91.192.165)
Brian L. Tierney Slide: 26

13
 tcpdump / tcptrace

 tcpdump: dump all TCP header information for a specified

source/destination
 ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/

 tcptrace: format tcpdump output for analysis using xplot

 http://www.tcptrace.org/
 NLANR TCP Testrig : Nice wrapper for tcpdump and tcptrace tools
 http://www.ncne.nlanr.net/TCP/testrig/

 Sample use:
tcpdump -s 100 -w /tmp/tcpdump.out host hostname
tcptrace -Sl /tmp/tcpdump.out
xplot /tmp/a2b_tsg.xpl

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 27

tcptrace and xplot

 X axis is time
 Y axis is sequence number
 the slope of this curve gives the throughput over
time.
 xplot tool make it easy to zoom in

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 28

14
 Zoomed In View
 Green Line: ACK values received from the receiver
 Yellow Line tracks the receive window advertised from the receiver
 Green Ticks track the duplicate ACKs received.
 Yellow Ticks track the window advertisements that were the same as
the last advertisement.
 White Arrows represent segments sent.
 Red Arrows (R) represent retransmitted segments

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 29

Other Tools

 NLANR Tools Repository:

 http://www.ncne.nlanr.net/software/tools/

 SLAC Network MonitoringTools List:

 http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/nmtf/nmtf-tools.html

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 30

15
 Other TCP Issues

 Things to be aware of:

 TCP slow-start
On a path with a 50 ms RTT, it takes 12 RTT’s to
ramp up to full window size, so need to send about
10 MB of data before the TCP congestion window
will fully open up.

 host issues
Memory copy speed
I/O Bus speed
Disk speed

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 31

TCP Slow Start

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 32

16
 Duplex Mismatch Issues
 A common source of trouble with Ethernet
networks is that the host is set to full duplex, but
the Ethernet switch is set to half-duplex, or visa
versa.
 Most newer hardware will auto-negotiate this, but
with some older hardware, auto-negotiation
sometimes fails
 result is a working but very slow network (typically only
1-2 Mbps)
 best for both to be in full duplex if possible, but some
older 100BT equipment only supports half-duplex
 NDT is a good tool for finding duplex issues:
 http://e2epi.internet2.edu/ndt/

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 33

Jumbo Frames

 Standard Ethernet packet is 1500 bytes (aka: MTU)

 Some gigabit Ethernet hardware supports “jumbo frames”
(jumbo packet) up to 9 KBytes
 This helps performance by reducing the number of host interrupts
 Some jumbo frame implementations do not interoperate
 Most routers allow at most 4K MTUs

 First Ethernet was 3 Mbps (1972)

 First 10 Gbit/sec Ethernet hardware: 2001
 Ethernet speeds have increased 3000x since the 1500 byte frame
was defined
 Computers now have to work 3000x harder to keep the network full

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 34

17
 Linux Autotuning

 Sender-side TCP buffer autotuning introduced in Linux 2.4

 TCP send buffer starts at 64 KB
 As the data transfer takes place, the buffer size is continuously re-
adjusted up max autotune size (default = 128K)
 Need to increase defaults: (in /etc/sysctl.conf)
# increase TCP max buffer size
net.core.rmem_max = 16777216
net.core.wmem_max = 16777216
# increase Linux autotuning TCP buffer limits
# min, default, and max number of bytes to use
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 16777216
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 65536 16777216

 Receive buffers need to be bigger than largest send buffer used

 Use setsockopt() call

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 35

Linux 2.4 Issues

 ssthresh caching
 ssthresh (Slow Start Threshold): size of CWND to use when
switching from exponential increase to linear increase
 The value for ssthresh for a given path is cached in the routing
table.
 If there is a retransmission on a connection to a given host, then
all connections to that host for the next 10 minutes will use a
reduced ssthresh.
 Or, if the previous connect to that host is particularly good, then
you might stay in slow start longer, so it depends on the path
 The only way to disable this behavior is to do the following before
all new connections (you must be root):
 sysctl -w net.ipv4.route.flush=1
 The web100 kernel patch adds a mechanism to permanently
disable this behavior:
 sysctl -w net.ipv4.web100_no_metrics_save = 1

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 36

18
 ssthresh caching

•The value of
CWND when
this loss
happened will
get cached

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 37

Linux 2.4 Issues (cont.)

 SACK implementation problem
 For very large BDP paths where the TCP window is > 20 MB, you
are likely to hit the Linux SACK implementation problem.
 If Linux has too many packets in flight when it gets a SACK event,
it takes too long to located the SACKed packet,
 you get a TCP timeout and CWND goes back to 1 packet.
 Restricting the TCP buffer size to about 12 MB seems to avoid this
problem, but limits your throughput.
 Another solution is to disable SACK.
sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_sack = 0
 This is still a problem in 2.6, but they are working on a solution
 Transmit queue overflow
 If the interface transmit queue overflows, the Linux TCP stack
treats this as a retransmission.
 Increasing txqueuelen can help:
ifconfig eth0 txqueuelen 1000

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 38

19
 NFNN2, 20th-21st June 2005
National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh

Recent/Current TCP Work

http://gridmon.dl.ac.uk/nfnn/

TCP Response Function

 Well known fact that TCP does not scale to high-

speed networks
 Average TCP congestion window = 1.2 p
segments
 p = packet loss rate
 What this means:
 For a TCP connection with 1500-byte packets and a
100 ms round-trip time, filling a 10 Gbps pipe would
require a congestion window of 83,333 packets, and a
packet drop rate of at most one drop every
5,000,000,000 packets.
 requires at most one packet loss every 6000s, or
1h:40m to keep the pipe full

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 40

20
 Proposed TCP Modifications

 High Speed TCP: Sally Floyd

 http://www.icir.org/floyd/hstcp.html
 BIC/CUBIC:
 http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/rhee/export/bitcp/
 LTCP (Layered TCP)
 http://students.cs.tamu.edu/sumitha/research.html
 HTCP: (Hamilton TCP)
 http://www.hamilton.ie/net/htcp/
 Scalable TCP
 http://www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/~ctk21/scalable/

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 41

Proposed TCP Modifications (cont.)

 XCP:
 XCP rapidly converges on the optimal congestion window using a
completely new router paradigm.
 This makes it very difficult to deploy and test
 http://www.ana.lcs.mit.edu/dina/XCP/
 FAST TCP:
 http://netlab.caltech.edu/FAST/

 Each of these alternatives give roughly similar throughput

 Vary mainly in “stability” and “friendliness” with other protocols
 Each of these require sender-side only modifications to
standard TCP

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 42

21
 TCP: Reno vs. BIC

 TCP-Reno
(Linux 2.4)

 BIC-TCP
(Linux 2.6)

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 43

TCP: Reno vs. BIC

• BIC-TCP
recovers from
loss more
aggressively
than TCP-Reno

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 44

22
 Sample Results
From Doug Leith, Hamilton Institute, http://www.hamilton.ie/net/eval/

Fairness
Between Flows

Link Utilization

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 45

New Linux 2.6 changes

 Added receive buffer autotuning: adjust receive window
based on RTT
 sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_moderate_rcvbuf
 Still need to increase max value: net.ipv4.tcp_rmem
 Starting in Linux 2.6.7 (and back-ported to 2.4.27), BIC
TCP is part of the kernel, and enabled by default.
 Bug found that caused performance problems under some
circumstances, fixed in 2.6.11.
 Added ability to disable ssthresh caching (like web100)
net.ipv4.tcp_no_metrics_save = 1

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 46

23
 Linux 2.6 Issues

 "tcp segmentation offload” issue:

 Linux 2.6 ( < 2.6.11) has bug with certain Gigabit and
10 Gig ethernet drivers and NICs that support "tcp
segmentation offload",
 These include Intel e1000 and ixgb drivers,
Broadcom tg3, and the s2io 10 GigE drivers.
To fix this problem, use ethtool to disable
segmentation offload:
ethtool -K eth0 tso off
 Bug fixed in Linux 2.6.12

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 47

Linux 2.6.12 Results

• BIC-TCP is ON by default in Linux 2.6
• un-tuned results up to 100x faster!
Path Linux 2.4 Linux 2.4 Linux 2.6 Linux 2.6,
Un-tuned Hand-tuned with BIC no BIC
LBL to ORNL 10 Mbps 300 Mbps 700 Mbps 500 Mbps
RTT = 67 ms
LBL to PSC 8 Mbps 300 Mbps 830 Mbps 625 Mbps
RTT = 83 ms

LBL to IE 4 Mbps 70 Mbps 560 Mbps 140 Mbps

RTT = 153 ms

• Results = Peak Speed during 3 minute test

• Must increase default max TCP send/receive buffers
• Sending host = 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon with Intel e1000 NIC

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 48

24
 Linux 2.6.12-rc3 Results

Note that BIC reaches

Max throughput MUCH
faster

RTT = 67 ms

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 49

Remaining Linux BIC Issues

 But: on
some
paths BIC
still seems
to have
problems…

RTT = 83 ms

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 50

25
 NFNN2, 20th-21st June 2005
National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh

Application Performance Issues

http://gridmon.dl.ac.uk/nfnn/

Techniques to Achieve High

Throughput over a WAN
 Consider using multiple TCP sockets for the data
stream
 Use a separate thread for each socket
 Keep the data pipeline full
 use asynchronous I/O
overlap I/O and computation
 read and write large amounts of data (> 1MB) at a time
whenever possible
 pre-fetch data whenever possible
 Avoid unnecessary data copies
 manipulate pointers to data blocks instead
Brian L. Tierney Slide: 52

26
 Use Asynchronous I/O
 I/O followed by
processing

Next IO starts
when processing
ends
 overlapped I/O and
processing

process
previous block

almost a 2:1 speedup remote IO

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 53

Throughput vs. Latency

 Most of the techniques we have discussed are designed

to improve throughput
 Some of these might increase latency
 with large TCP buffers, OS will buffer more data before sending it
 Goal of a distributed application programmer:
 hide latency
 Some techniques to help decrease latency:
 use separate control and data sockets
 use TCP_NODELAY option on control socket
 combine control messages together into 1 larger message
whenever possible on TCP_NODELAY sockets

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 54

27
 scp Issues

 Don’t use scp to copy large files!

 scp has its own internal buffering/windowing that
prevents it from ever being able to fill LFNs!
 Explanation of problem and openssh patch
solution from PSC
 http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/

Brian L. Tierney Slide: 55

Conclusions
 The wizard gap is starting to close (slowly)
 If max TCP buffers are increased
 Tuning TCP is not easy!
 no single solution fits all situations
 need to be careful TCP buffers are not too big or too small
 sometimes parallel streams help throughput, sometimes they hurt
 Linux 2.6 helps a lot
 Design your network application to be as flexible as possible
 make it easy for clients/users to set the TCP buffer sizes
 make it possible to turn on/off parallel socket transfers
 probably off by default
 Design your application for the future
 even if your current WAN connection is only 45 Mbps (or less), some day
it will be much higher, and these issues will become even more important

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 For More Information

http://dsd.lbl.gov/TCP-tuning/
 links to all network tools mentioned here
 sample TCP buffer tuning code, etc.

BLTierney@LBL.GOV

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