Subject: Re: Qdisc: Measuring Head-of-Line blocking with netperf-wrapper

From: Rick Jones <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 12:12:24 -0700

On 09/15/2014 11:55 AM, Dave Taht wrote:
> Problems with TCP_RR and UDP_RR are that they are subject to a RTO on
> packet loss.

One possible way to work/kludge around that for TCP_RR would be to have 
a burst-mode test with say five or so transactions in flight at one 
time.  That then should allow for fast retrans on the occasional 
single-packet loss and it will be just an RTT rather than an RTO.  There 
would probably be some interactions with cwnd and bundling though upon 
that retransmission, even with -D set.

> It would be nice if netperf could sprout a "send a user specified
> packet size on this isochronous interval (with a resolution below a
> ms) over X transport" test. Or there was something simpler than owamp
> but as secure.

If you are willing to let netperf spin (ie burn local CPU on the system 
on which netperf is running) over the interval you can configure 
--enable-intervals --enable-spin  and then it will spin rather than rely 
on the resolution of setitimer().  Then the command line would be 
something along the lines of:

netperf -H <destination> -b 1 -w <waittime> -- -m <size>

and it will then make one send of <size> every <waittime>.

happy benchmarking,

rick