[e2e] Need help: setting winsock receive low watermark while using completion port and TCP

[Agarwal, Anil]

All,

"Completion Port Model" is a Windows-specific mechanism. I suspect this
question requires some Windows expertise, rather than TCP expertise. See
links below for some info on this topic -

http://www.nevelsteen.com/coding/completion_ports_in_delphi.htm
http://www.sysinternals.com/Information/IoCompletionPorts.html

Anil Agarwal
Viasat Inc.
22300 Comsat Dr.
Clarksburg, MD 20871
(W) 301-428-4655
Anil.Agarwal at viasat.com


-----Original Message-----
From: end2end-interest-bounces at postel.org
[mailto:end2end-interest-bounces at postel.org]On Behalf Of Sireen Habib
Malik
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 9:30 AM
To: Alex Krivonosov (alexkr)
Cc: end2end-interest at postel.org
Subject: Re: [e2e] Need help: setting winsock receive low watermark
while using completion port and TCP



> 
>I have a TCP connection handled by the completion port IO model. What is
>happening is in case I specify a large buffer for receiving (WSARecv),
>the operation completes only after the buffer is full, not after
>receiving about 500 bytes (a packet), so a significant delay is
>introduced. In case of small buffers, performance degrades. Any advice
>on this? Completion port model is a must.
>  
>
No idea what a "completion port model" is! Here are some hints for your 
question.

Large delay for large buffer is intuitively clear. For the small 
buffers, consider the relation:

Maximum Window (Wmax) = BufferSize+ Capacity*RTT
(assuming error-free medium, and that Capacity is the speed of the ONLY 
bottleneck).

For the more common TCP versions, Wmax should not be so small that TCP 
does not get a chance to get out of the Slow-Start phase. For 
triple-duplicates to arrive, there should be atleast 3 packets 
successfully delievered after the lost packet. Otherwise, TCP time-outs. 
If your client access-speed is small, give your connection enough 
buffer-space to "atleast" get to the saw-tooth behavior.

The other possibility is that with a large buffer the connection can 
operate at the Maximum Congestion Window, however, with a small buffer 
you are  forcing it go into the saw-tooth congestion control. So poorer 
performance, relatively speaking.

Hope that helps.
--
SM