[Bloat] Initial tests with BBR in kernel 4.9

[Hans-Kristian Bakke]

Okay, here is some captures. It took a while as I of course had to create a
script for it as the public iperf3 server is not always free to do tests.
I think there are enough context with the folder names to make sense of it.

https://owncloud.proikt.com/index.php/s/eY6eZmjDlznar0N

On 26 January 2017 at 00:04, Hans-Kristian Bakke <hkbakke at gmail.com> wrote:

> I can do that. I guess I should do the capture from tun1 as that is the
> place that the tcp-traffic is visible? My non-virtual nic is only seeing
> OpenVPN encapsulated UDP-traffic.
>
> On 25 January 2017 at 23:48, Neal Cardwell <ncardwell at google.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 5:38 PM, Hans-Kristian Bakke <hkbakke at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Actually.. the 1-4 mbit/s results with fq sporadically appears again as
>>> I keep testing but it is most likely caused by all the unknowns between me
>>> an my testserver. But still, changing to pfifo_qdisc seems to normalize the
>>> throughput again with BBR, could this be one of those times where BBR and
>>> pacing actually is getting hurt for playing nice in some very variable
>>> bottleneck on the way?
>>>
>>
>> Possibly. Would you be able to take a tcpdump trace of each trial
>> (headers only would be ideal), and post on a web site somewhere a pcap
>> trace for one of the slow trials?
>>
>> For example:
>>
>>    tcpdump -n -w /tmp/out.pcap -s 120 -i eth0 -c 1000000 &
>>
>> thanks,
>> neal
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> On 25 January 2017 at 23:01, Neal Cardwell <ncardwell at google.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 3:54 PM, Hans-Kristian Bakke <hkbakke at gmail.com
>>>> > wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi
>>>>>
>>>>> Kernel 4.9 finally landed in Debian testing so I could finally test
>>>>> BBR in a real life environment that I have struggled with getting any kind
>>>>> of performance out of.
>>>>>
>>>>> The challenge at hand is UDP based OpenVPN through europe at around 35
>>>>> ms rtt to my VPN-provider with plenty of available bandwith available in
>>>>> both ends and everything completely unknown in between. After tuning the
>>>>> UDP-buffers up to make room for my 500 mbit/s symmetrical bandwith at 35 ms
>>>>> the download part seemed to work nicely at an unreliable 150 to 300 mbit/s,
>>>>> while the upload was stuck at 30 to 60 mbit/s.
>>>>>
>>>>> Just by activating BBR the bandwith instantly shot up to around 150
>>>>> mbit/s using a fat tcp test to a public iperf3 server located near my VPN
>>>>> exit point in the Netherlands. Replace BBR with qubic again and the
>>>>> performance is once again all over the place ranging from very bad to bad,
>>>>> but never better than 1/3 of BBRs "steady state". In other words "instant
>>>>> WIN!"
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Glad to hear it. Thanks for the test report!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> However, seeing the requirement of fq and pacing for BBR and noticing
>>>>> that I am running pfifo_fast within a VM with virtio NIC on a Proxmox VE
>>>>> host with fq_codel on all physical interfaces, I was surprised to see that
>>>>> it worked so well.
>>>>> I then replaced pfifo_fast with fq and the performance went right down
>>>>> to only 1-4 mbit/s from around 150 mbit/s. Removing the fq again regained
>>>>> the performance at once.
>>>>>
>>>>> I have got some questions to you guys that know a lot more than me
>>>>> about these things:
>>>>>
>>>> 1. Do fq (and fq_codel) even work reliably in a VM? What is the best
>>>>> choice for default qdisc to use in a VM in general?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Eric covered this one. We are not aware of specific issues with fq in
>>>> VM environments. And  we have tested that fq works sufficiently well on
>>>> Google Cloud VMs.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> 2. Why do BBR immediately "fix" all my issues with upload through that
>>>>> "unreliable" big BDP link with pfifo_fast when fq pacing is a requirement?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> For BBR, pacing is part of the design in order to make BBR more
>>>> "gentle" in terms of the rate at which it sends, in order to put less
>>>> pressure on buffers and keep packet loss lower. This is particularly
>>>> important when a BBR flow is restarting from idle. In this case BBR starts
>>>> with a full cwnd, and it counts on pacing to pace out the packets at the
>>>> estimated bandwidth, so that the queue can stay relatively short and yet
>>>> the pipe can be filled immediately.
>>>>
>>>> Running BBR without pacing makes BBR more aggressive, particularly in
>>>> restarting from idle, but also in the steady state, where BBR tries to use
>>>> pacing to keep the queue short.
>>>>
>>>> For bulk transfer tests with one flow, running BBR without pacing will
>>>> likely cause higher queues and loss rates at the bottleneck, which may
>>>> negatively impact other traffic sharing that bottleneck.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> 3. Could fq_codel on the physical host be the reason that it still
>>>>> works?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Nope, fq_codel does not implement pacing.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> 4. Do BBR _only_ work with fq pacing or could fq_codel be used as a
>>>>> replacement?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Nope, BBR needs pacing to work correctly, and currently fq is the only
>>>> Linux qdisc that implements pacing.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> 5. Is BBR perhaps modified to do the right thing without having to
>>>>> change the qdisc in the current kernel 4.9?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Nope. Linux 4.9 contains the initial public release of BBR from
>>>> September 2016. And there have been no code changes since then (just
>>>> expanded comments).
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for the test report!
>>>>
>>>> neal
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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