TCP Small Queues

Linux 3.6 just shipped.  As I’ve noted before, bloat occurs in multiple places in an OS stack (and applications!). If your OS TCP implementation fills transmit queues more than needed, full queues will cause the RTT to increase, etc. , causing TCP to misbehave. Net result: additional latency, with no increase in bandwidth performance. TCP small queues reduces the buffering without sacrificing performance, reducing latency.

To quote the Kernel Newbies page:

TCP small queues is another mechanism designed to fight bufferbloat. TCP Small Queues goal is to reduce number of TCP packets in xmit queues (qdisc & device queues), to reduce RTT and cwnd bias, part of the bufferbloat problem. Without reduction of nominal bandwidth, we have reduction of buffering per bulk sender : < 1ms on Gbit (instead of 50ms with TSO) and < 8ms on 100Mbit (instead of 132 ms).

Eric Dumazet (now at Google) is the author of TSQ. It is covered in more detail at LWN.  Thanks to Eric for his great work!

The combination of TSQ, fq_codel and BQL (Byte Queue Limits) gets us much of the way to solving bufferbloat on Ethernet in Linux. Unfortunately, wireless remains a challenge (the drivers need to have a bunch of packets for 802.11n aggregation, and this occurs below the level that fq_codel can work on), as do other device types.  For example, a particular DSL device we looked at last week has a minimum ring buffer size of 16, again, occurring beneath Linux’s queue discipline layer.  “Smart” hardware has become a major headache. So there is much to be done yet in Linux, much less other operating systems.