When TCP operates in lossy environments (between 1 and 10 % packet
losses), many SACK blocks can be exchanged, and I noticed we could
drop them on busy senders, if these SACK blocks have to be queued
into the socket backlog.
While the main cause is the poor performance of RACK/SACK processing,
we can try to avoid these drops of valuable information that can lead to
spurious timeouts and retransmits.
Cause of the drops is the skb->truesize overestimation caused by :
- drivers allocating ~2048 (or more) bytes as a fragment to hold an
Ethernet frame.
- various pskb_may_pull() calls bringing the headers into skb->head
might have pulled all the frame content, but skb->truesize could
not be lowered, as the stack has no idea of each fragment truesize.
The backlog drops are also more visible on bidirectional flows, since
their sk_rmem_alloc can be quite big.
Let's add some room for the backlog, as only the socket owner
can selectively take action to lower memory needs, like collapsing
receive queues or partial ofo pruning.
Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com> Cc: Yuchung Cheng <ycheng@google.com> Cc: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com> Acked-by: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>