Linux Router: TCP slow, UDP fast

Chris chris at ghostbusters.co.uk
Sat Feb 14 12:25:23 UTC 2009


Hi All,

I'm losing the will to live with this networking headache ! Please feel free
to point me at a Linux list if NANOG isn't suitable. I'm at a loss where
else to ask.

I've diagnosed some traffic oddities and after lots of head-scratching,
reading and trial and error I can say with certainty that:

With and without shaping and over different bandwidth providers using the
e1000 driver for an Intel PRO/1000 MT Dual Port Gbps NIC (82546EB) I can
replicate full, expected throughput with UDP but consistently only get
300kbps - 600kbps throughput _per connection_ for outbound TCP (I couldn't
find a tool I trusted to replicate ICMP traffic). Multiple connections are
cumulative and increase incrementally at roughly 300kbps - 600kbps. Inbound
seems slightly erratic in holding a consistent speed but manages 15Mbps as
expected, a far cry from 300kbps to 600kbps.

The router is Quad Core sitting at no load and there's very little traffic
being forwarded back and forth. The NIC's kernel parameters are set at
default as 'built-in'. NAPI is not enabled though (enabling it requires a
reboot which is a problem as this box is in production).

The only other change to the box is that over Christmas IPtables
(ip_conntrack and its associated modules mainly) was loaded into the kernel
as 'built-in'. There's no sign of packet loss on any tests and I upped the
conntrack max_connections size suitably for the amount of RAM. Has anyone
come across IPtables without any rules loaded causing throughput issues ?

I've also changed the following kernel parameters with no luck:

  net.core.rmem_max = 16777216
  net.core.wmem_max = 16777216

  net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 16777216
  net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 65536 16777216

  net.ipv4.tcp_no_metrics_save = 1

  net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 2500

  echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling

It feels to me like a buffer limit is being reached 'per connection'. The
throughput spikes at around 1.54Mbps and TCP backs off to about 300kbps -
600kbps or so. What am I missing ? Is NAPI that essential for such low
traffic ? A very similar build moved far higher throughput on cheap NICs.
MTU is at 1500, txqueuelen is 1000.

Any help would be massively appreciated !

Chris



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