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tcp: reduce spurious retransmits due to transient SACK reneging
This commit reduces spurious retransmits due to apparent SACK reneging by only reacting to SACK reneging that persists for a short delay. When a sequence space hole at snd_una is filled, some TCP receivers send a series of ACKs as they apparently scan their out-of-order queue and cumulatively ACK all the packets that have now been consecutiveyly received. This is essentially misbehavior B in "Misbehaviors in TCP SACK generation" ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, April 2011, so we suspect that this is from several common OSes (Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP). However, this issue has also been seen in other cases, e.g. the netdev thread "TCP being hoodwinked into spurious retransmissions by lack of timestamps?" from March 2014, where the receiver was thought to be a BSD box. Since snd_una would temporarily be adjacent to a previously SACKed range in these scenarios, this receiver behavior triggered the Linux SACK reneging code path in the sender. This led the sender to clear the SACK scoreboard, enter CA_Loss, and spuriously retransmit (potentially) every packet from the entire write queue at line rate just a few milliseconds before the ACK for each packet arrives at the sender. To avoid such situations, now when a sender sees apparent reneging it does not yet retransmit, but rather adjusts the RTO timer to give the receiver a little time (max(RTT/2, 10ms)) to send us some more ACKs that will restore sanity to the SACK scoreboard. If the reneging persists until this RTO then, as before, we clear the SACK scoreboard and enter CA_Loss. A 10ms delay tolerates a receiver sending such a stream of ACKs at 56Kbit/sec. And to allow for receivers with slower or more congested paths, we wait for at least RTT/2. We validated the resulting max(RTT/2, 10ms) delay formula with a mix of North American and South American Google web server traffic, and found that for ACKs displaying transient reneging: (1) 90% of inter-ACK delays were less than 10ms (2) 99% of inter-ACK delays were less than RTT/2 In tests on Google web servers this commit reduced reneging events by 75%-90% (as measured by the TcpExtTCPSACKReneging counter), without any measurable impact on latency for user HTTP and SPDY requests. Signed-off-by:Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com> Signed-off-by: