[Make-wifi-fast] On the ath9k performance regression with FQ and crypto

[Eric Dumazet]

Do you have tcpdumps of

1) sample with crypto

2) sample without crypto.

Looks like some TCP Small queue interaction with skb->truesize, if GSO
is involved, or encapsulation adding overhead.


On Tue, 2016-08-16 at 22:41 +0200, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen wrote:
> So Dave and I have been spending the last couple of days trying to
> narrow down why there's a performance regression in some cases on ath9k
> with the softq-FQ patches. Felix first noticed this regression, and LEDE
> currently carries a patch [1] to disable the FQ portion of the softq
> patches to avoid it.
> 
> While we have been able to narrow it down a little bit, no solution has
> been forthcoming, so this is an attempt to describe the bug in the hope
> that someone else will have an idea about what could be causing it.
> 
> What we're seeing is the following (when the access point is running
> ath9k with the softq patches):
> 
> When running two or more flows to a station, their combined throughput
> will be roughly 20-30% lower than the throughput of a single flow to the
> same station. This happens:
> 
> - for both TCP and UDP traffic.
> - independent of the base rate (i.e. signal quality).
> - but only with crypto enabled (WPA2 CCMP in this case).
> 
> However, the regression completely disappears if either of the
> following is true:
> 
> - no crypto is enabled.
> - the FQ part of mac80211 is disabled (as in [1]).
> 
> We have been able to reproduce this behaviour on two different ath9k
> hardware chips and two different architectures.
> 
> The cause of the regression seems to be that the aggregates are smaller
> when there are two flows than when there is only one. Adding debug
> statements to the aggregate forming code indicates that this is because
> no more packets are available when the aggregates are built (i.e.
> ieee80211_tx_dequeue() returns NULL).
> 
> We have not been able to determine why the queues run empty when this
> combination of circumstances arise. Since we easily get upwards of 120
> Mbps of TCP throughput without crypto but with full FQ, it's clearly not
> the hashing overhead in itself that does it (and the hashing also
> happens with just one flow, so the overhead is still there). And the
> crypto itself should be offloaded to hardware (shouldn't it? we do see a
> marked drop in overall throughput from just enabling crypto), so how
> would the queueing (say, mixing of packets from different flows)
> influence that?
> 
> Does anyone have any ideas? We are stumped...
> 
> -Toke
> 
> [1] https://git.lede-project.org/?p=lede/nbd/staging.git;a=blob;f=package/kernel/mac80211/patches/220-fq_disable_hack.patch;h=7f420beea56335d5043de6fd71b5febae3e9bd79;hb=HEAD
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