In previous discussions, I tried to find some reasonable heuristics
for delayed ACK, however this seems not possible, according to Eric:
"ACKS might also be delayed because of bidirectional
traffic, and is more controlled by the application
response time. TCP stack can not easily estimate it."
"ACK can be incredibly useful to recover from losses in
a short time.
The vast majority of TCP sessions are small lived, and we
send one ACK per received segment anyway at beginning or
retransmits to let the sender smoothly increase its cwnd,
so an auto-tuning facility wont help them that much."
and according to David:
"ACKs are the only information we have to detect loss.
And, for the same reasons that TCP VEGAS is fundamentally
broken, we cannot measure the pipe or some other
receiver-side-visible piece of information to determine
when it's "safe" to stretch ACK.
And even if it's "safe", we should not do it so that losses are
accurately detected and we don't spuriously retransmit.
The only way to know when the bandwidth increases is to
"test" it, by sending more and more packets until drops happen.
That's why all successful congestion control algorithms must
operate on explicited tested pieces of information.
Similarly, it's not really possible to universally know if
it's safe to stretch ACK or not."
It still makes sense to enable or disable quick ack mode like
what TCP_QUICK_ACK does.
Similar to TCP_QUICK_ACK option, but for people who can't
modify the source code and still wants to control
TCP delayed ACK behavior. As David suggested, this should belong
to per-path scope, since different pathes may want different
behaviors.
Cc: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
Cc: Rick Jones <rick.jones2@hp.com>
Cc: Stephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Thomas Graf <tgraf@suug.ch>
CC: David Laight <David.Laight@ACULAB.COM>
Signed-off-by: Cong Wang <amwang@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
bcefe17cff