Re: large pause when opening file descriptor which is power of 2

[Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 11:42:01PM +0000, Kernel.org Bugbot wrote:
> Yes. I'm using using sockets for IPC. Specifically haproxy with its
> SPOE protocol. Low latency is important. Normally a call (including
> optional connect if a new connection is needed) will easily complete
> in under 100us. So I want to set a timeout of 1ms to avoid blocking
> traffic. However because this issue effectively randomly pops up,
> that 1ms timeout is too low, and the issue can actually impact
> multiple in-flight requests because haproxy tries to share that one
> IPC connection for them all. But if I raise the timeout (and I'd have
> to raise it to something like 100ms, as I've seen delays up to 47ms in
> just light testing), then I run the risk of significantly impacting
> traffic if there is a legitimate slowdown. While a low timeout and
> the occasional failure is probably the better of the two options,
> I'd prefer not to fail at all.

A quick workaround for this might be to use dup2() to open a newfd
that is larger than you think your process will ever use.  ulimit -n
is 1024 (on my system), so choosing 1023 might be a good idea.
It'll waste a little memory, but ensures the fd array will never need to
expand.