Re: disabling nagle

[Mika Liljeberg <mika.liljeberg@welho.com>]

On Wed, 2003-02-05 at 08:47, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
> On 5 February 2003 02:01, Dave Slicer wrote:
> > Others already answered this specific question, but I wonder how hard
> > it would be to create a patch to disable TCP's timeout and retransmit
> > mechanisms on a given interface?  This would allow those of us who
> > have no alternative other than PPP over ssh for VPN to greatly
> > improve performance. Over a well behaved connection this works
> > acceptably, but given any delays or packet loss it is essentially
> > unusable.  I know the real answer is using something other than TCP
> > as the transport layer for the tunnel (IPSEC, IP over IP, UDP, etc.)
> > but that isn't always possible.  So I'd like a way to treat the ppp
> > interface the VPN tunnel creates as a completely reliable transport
> > for which normal TCP/IP retransmits and timeouts don't apply. It'd
> > just bullheadedly go along transmitting data and assuming it was
> > received -- the underlying TCP transport can take care of making the
> > link reliable.
> 
> I want this too ;) For one, it would be a perfect example of using
> good existing tools to achieve the goal instead of inventing
> something big and new. Also it does not reduce MTU unlike
> packet-encapsulation tunnels.
> 
> Now it's an imperfect example due to noted TCP over TCP performance
> problem ('internal meltdown').

I doubt a hack like disabling RTO would make it into the kernel.
However, try enabling F-RTO at both ends (echo 1 >
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_frto). This should improve things quite a bit.

You need at least linux 2.4.21-pre3, or linux 2.5.x.

	MikaL