Subject: Re: TCP keepalive timer problem

From: Eric Dumazet <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:17:10 +0200

Andi Kleen a écrit :
> Eric Dumazet <[email-masked]> writes:
>> Now, 7200 seconds might be inappropriate for special needs, and considering
>> there is no way to change tcp_retries2 for a given socket (only choice being the global
>> tcp_retries2 setting), I would vote for a change in our stack, to *relax* RFC,
>> and get smaller keepalive timers if possible.
> 
> I think the better fix would be to just to only do that when
> tcp_retries2 > keep alive time. So keep the existing behaviour
> with default keep alive, but switch when the user defined
> a very short keep alive.
> 

tcp_retries2 is a number of retries, its difficult to derive a time from it.

Also, it's not clear what behavior you are refering to.
Imagine we can be smart and compute tcp_retries2_time (in jiffies) from tcp_retries2
If keepalive_timer fires and we have packets in flight, what heuristic do you suggest ?

if (tp->packets_out || tcp_send_head(sk))
	if (tcp_retries2_time < keepalive_time_when(tp))
		goto resched;
elapsed = tcp_time_stamp - tp->rcv_tstamp;
...

What would be the gain ?
Arming timer exactly every keepalive_time_when(tp)
instead of keepalive_time_when(tp) - (tcp_time_stamp - tp->rcv_tstamp) ?