netdev - Re: [PATCH 4/4] Staging: Octeon: Free transmit SKBs in a timely manner.

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Message-ID: <1266268271.2859.22.camel@edumazet-laptop>
Date:	Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:11:11 +0100
From:	Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@...il.com>
To:	David Daney <ddaney@...iumnetworks.com>
Cc:	ralf@...ux-mips.org, linux-mips@...ux-mips.org,
	netdev@...r.kernel.org, gregkh@...e.de
Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/4] Staging: Octeon:  Free transmit SKBs in a timely
 manner.

Le lundi 15 février 2010 à 12:41 -0800, David Daney a écrit :
> On 02/15/2010 12:27 PM, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> > Le lundi 15 février 2010 à 12:13 -0800, David Daney a écrit :
> >> If we wait for the once-per-second cleanup to free transmit SKBs,
> >> sockets with small transmit buffer sizes might spend most of their
> >> time blocked waiting for the cleanup.
> >>
> >> Normally we do a cleanup for each transmitted packet.  We add a
> >> watchdog type timer so that we also schedule a timeout for 150uS after
> >> a packet is transmitted.  The watchdog is reset for each transmitted
> >> packet, so for high packet rates, it never expires.  At these high
> >> rates, the cleanups are done for each packet so the extra watchdog
> >> initiated cleanups are not needed.
> >
> > s/needed/fired/
> >
> 
> or perhaps s/are not needed/are neither needed nor fired/
> 
> > Hmm, but re-arming a timer for each transmited packet must have a cost ?
> >
> 
> The cost is fairly low (less than 10 processor clock cycles).  We didn't 
> add this for amusement, people actually do things like only send UDP 
> packets from userspace.  Since we can fill the transmit queue faster 
> than it is emptied, the socket transmit buffer is quickly consumed.  If 
> we don't free the SKBs in short order, the transmitting process get to 
> take a long sleep (until our previous once per second clean up task was 
> run).

I understand this, but traditionaly, NIC drivers dont use a timer, but a
'TX complete' interrupt, that usually fires a few us after packet
submission on Gigabit speed.

A fast program could try to send X small udp packets in less than 150
us, X being greater than the size of your TX ring.

So your patch makes the window smaller, but it still is there (at
physical layer, we'll see a burst of packets, a ~100us delay, then a
second burst)



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