Help for TCP understanding wanted, ACK-MSS-Window [Was: Re: best practice to watch TCP parms of established sockets]

[Harald Schmalzbauer]

Harald Schmalzbauer schrieb am 17.02.2010 20:15 (localtime):
...
>>> Now my first idea is to compare MSS and windows sizes before and after the performance drop.
>>> How do I best capture them? tdpcump? It's GbE linkspeed...
>> It seems more likely that ZFS is running into slowdowns from resource contention, memory fragmentation, etc than your network would suddenly drop out, but tcpdump -w outfile.pcap is a good method of looking....
> 
> Thanks, but fisrt tests showed that ZFS is not causing the slowdown.

Hello,

I got exactly the same limitations when using tmpfs. So for now I'll 
concentrate on that, back to ZFS later.

Please clarify my TCP understanding.
If I have the window set to 65535 in the header and a MSS of 1460, how 
often should the receiver send ACK segments? window/MSS, right?
Now I see every two segments acknowledged in my dump (rsync between two 
em0 interaces).
I'd like to understand
a) why disabling net.inet.tcp.rfc1323 gives slightly better rsync 
throughput than enabled
b) why I can't transfer more than 50MB/s over my direct linked GbE boxes.

But right now I even don't understand the dump I see. As far as I 
understand I should only see every 45 data segments one ACK segment. 
That would clearly explain to me why I can't saturate my GbE link. But I 
can't imagine this is a uncovered faulty behaviour, so I guess I haven't 
understood TCP.

Please help.

Thanks in advance,

-Harry

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