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# Fornax's Guide To Ridiculously Fast Ethernet
- [Introduction](#introduction)
- [Sysctls](#sysctls)
- [net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control](#net-ipv4-tcp-congestion-control)
- [net.core.default_qdisc](#net-core-default-qdisc)
- [net.ipv4.tcp_shrink_window](#net-ipv4-tcp-shrink-window)
- [net.ipv4.tcp_{w,r}mem](#net-ipv4-tcp-w-r-mem)
- [net.ipv4.tcp_mem](#net-ipv4-tcp-mem)
- [Network Interface Cards](#network-interface-cards)
- [ethtool](#ethtool)
- [Channels (ethtool -l)](#channels-ethtool-l)
- [Ring buffers (ethtool -g)](#ring-buffers-ethtool-g)
- [Interrupt Coalescing (ethtool -c)](#interrupt-coalescing-ethtool-c)
- [BIOS](#bios)
- [NUMA Nodes per socket](#numa-nodes-per-socket)
- [SMT Control](#smt-control)
- [IOMMU](#iommu)
- [Reverse proxy](#reverse-proxy)
- [Operating system](#operating-system)
- [Kernel](#kernel)
## Introduction
You might have just downloaded a 10 GB file in 20 seconds and wondered how that
is even possible. Well, it took a lot of effort to get there.
When I first ordered a 100 GbE server I expected things to just work. Imagine my
surprise when the server crashed when serving at just 20 Gigabit.
Then I expected my server host to be able to help with the performance problems.
Spoiler alert: They could not help me.
That's where my journey into the rabbit hole of network performance started. It
took me just about a year to figure out all the details of high speed
networking, and now pixeldrain can finally serve files at 100 Gigabit per
second.
Below is a summary of everything I discovered during my year of reading NIC
manuals, digging through the kernel sources and patching the kernel.
## Sysctls
When looking into network performance problems the `sysctl`s are usually the
first thing you get pointed at. There is **a ton** of conflicting information
online about which sysctls do what and what to set them to.
Sysctls are not persistent through reboots, add these lines to
`/etc/sysctl.conf` to apply them at startup.
Through experimentation and kernel recompilation I finally settled on these
values:
### net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control
You might have heard of BBR. Google's new revolutionary congestion control
algorithm. You might have heard conflicting information about how good it is. I
have extensively tested all congestion controls in the kernel and I can say
without a doubt that BBR is the best, by far! BBR is the only algo which does
not absolutely tank your transfer rate when a packet is lost.
TCP BBR was merged into the kernel at version 4.9. I know the sysctl says ipv4,
but it works for IPv6 as well.
`net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control=bbr`
### net.core.default_qdisc
The qdisc (queuing discipline) is another param which gets mentioned often. The
qdisc orders packets which are queued so they can be sent in the most efficient
order possible. The thing is, when you're sending at 100 Gbps then queuing is
completely irrelevant, the network is rarely the bottleneck here.
Google used to require `fq` with `bbr`, but that requirement has been dropped. I
suggest you use something minimal and fast. How about `pfifo_fast`, it has fast
in the name, must be good, right?
`net.core.default_qdisc=pfifo_fast`
This option is only applied after a reboot.
### net.ipv4.tcp_shrink_window
This sysctl was developed by Cloudflare. The patch was merged into Linux 6.1. If
you are on an older kernel version than 6.1 you will need to manually apply [the
patches](https://github.com/cloudflare/linux/) and compile the kernel on your
machine. Without this patch the kernel will waste so much time and memory on
buffer management that by the time you reach 100 Gigabit the kernel won’t even
have time to run your app anymore.
Cloudflare has an extensive writeup about the problem this sysctl solves here:
[Unbounded memory usage by TCP for receive buffers, and how we fixed
it](https://blog.cloudflare.com/unbounded-memory-usage-by-tcp-for-receive-buffers-and-how-we-fixed-it/)
This sysctl makes sure that TCP buffers are shrunk if they are larger than they
need to be. Without this sysctl your buffers will grow forever! Before I
discovered this patch my servers would regularly run out of memory during peak
load, and these are servers with a TERABYTE OF RAM! After applying the patches
(and compiling the kernel, because the patches were not merged yet back then)
memory usage from TCP buffers was reduced by 90%. And performance has improved
considerably. This patch is so crucial for performance that it boggles my mind
that it's not enabled by default.
`net.ipv4.tcp_shrink_window=1`
Cloudflare has some other sysctls as well, but those focus more on latency than
throughput. You can find them here: [Optimizing TCP for high WAN throughput
while preserving low
latency](https://blog.cloudflare.com/optimizing-tcp-for-high-throughput-and-low-latency/).
The `net.ipv4.tcp_collapse_max_bytes` sysctl they write about here was never
merged into the kernel. But while it does improve latency a bit, it's not that
important for throughput.
### net.ipv4.tcp_{w,r}mem
These variables dictate how much memory can be allocated for your send and
receive buffers. The send and receive buffers are where TCP packets are stores
which are not yet acknowledged by the peer. The required size of these buffers
depends on your [Bandwidth-Delay Product
(BDP)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth-delay_product). This concept is
crucial to understand. If you set the TCP buffers too small it will literally
put a speed limit on your connection.
First let's go over how TCP sends data. TCP can retransmit packets if the client
did not receive them. To do this TCP needs to keep all the data it sends to the
client in memory until the client acknowledges (ACK) that it has been properly
received. The acknowledgment takes one round trip to the client and back.
Let's say you want to send a file from Amsterdam to Tokyo. The server sends the
first packet, 130ms later the client on Tokyo receives the data packet. The
client then sends ACK to tell the server that the packet was properly received,
the ACK takes 130ms to arrive back in Amsterdam. Only now can the server remove
the packet from memory. The whole exchange took 260ms.
Now let's say we want to send files at 10 Gigabit. 10 Gigabit is 1250 MB. We
multiply the number of bytes we want to send per second by the number of seconds
it takes to get back the ACK. That's `1250 MB * 0.260 s = 325 MB`. Now we know
that our buffer needs to be at least 325 MB to reach a speed of 10 Gigabit over
a 260ms round trip.
The kernel also stores some other TCP-related stuff in that memory, and we also
need to account for packet loss which causes packets to be stored for a longer
time. For this reason pixeldrain servers use a maximum buffer size of 1 GiB.
```
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem='4096 65536 1073741824'
net.core.wmem_max=1073741824
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem='4096 65536 1073741824'
net.core.rmem_max=1073741824
```
The three values in the wmem and rmem are the minimum buffer size, the default
buffer size and the maximum buffer size.
### net.ipv4.tcp_mem
We just configured the buffer sizes, what's this for then? Well... we can tune
TCP buffers per connection all we want, but all that is for nothing if the
kernel still limits the TCP buffers globally.
This sysctl configures how much system memory can be used for TCP buffers. On
boot these values are set based on available system memory, which is good. But
by default it only uses like 5% of the memory, which is bad. We need to pump
those numbers way up to get anywhere near the speed that we want.
tcp_mem is defined as three separate values. These values are in numbers of
memory pages. A memory page is usually 4096B. Here is what these three values mean:
* `low`: When TCP memory is below this threshold then TCP buffer sizes are not
limited.
* `pressure`: When the TCP memory usage exceeds this threshold it will try to
shrink some TCP buffers to free up memory. It will keep doing this until
memory usage drops below `low` again. You don't want to set `low` and
`pressure` too far apart.
* `high`: The TCP system can't allocate more than this number of pages. If this
limit is reached and a new TCP session is opened it will not be able to
allocate any memory. Needless to say this is terrible for performance.
After a lot of experimentation with these values I have come to the conclusion
that the best values for these parameters are 60% of RAM, 70% of RAM and 80% of
RAM. This will use most of the RAM for TCP buffers if needed, but also leaves
plenty for your applications.
I set these values dynamically per host with Ansible:
```yaml
{{noescape `- name: configure tcp_mem
sysctl:
name: net.ipv4.tcp_mem
value: "{{ (mempages|int * 0.6)|int }} {{ (mempages|int * 0.7)|int }} {{ (mempages|int * 0.8)|int }}"
state: present
vars:
mempages: "{{ ansible_memtotal_mb * 256 }}" # There are 256 mempages in a MiB`}}
```
## Network Interface Cards
There are lots of NICs to choose from. From my testing there are a lot of bad
apples in the bunch. The only NIC types I have had any luck with are ConnectX-5
and ConnectX-6.
Often you see advice to install a proprietary driver for your NIC. Don't do
that. In my experience that has only caused problems. Nvidia's NIC drivers are
just as shitty as their video drivers. They will break kernel updates and
generally make your life miserable.
Upgrading the firmware for your NIC can be a good idea.
## ethtool
Ethtool is a program which you can use to configure your network card. There is
lots of stuff to configure here, but there are only three settings which really
matter.
Ethtool needs your network interface name for every operation. In this guide we
will refer to your interface name as `$INTERFACE`. You can get your interface
name from `ip a`.
### Channels (ethtool -l)
The channels param configures how many CPU cores will communicate with the NIC.
You generally want this number to be equal to the number of CPU cores you have,
that way the load will be evenly spread across your CPU. If you have more CPU
cores than your NIC supports you can try turning multithreading off in the BIOS.
Or just accept that only a portion of your cores will communicate with the NIC,
it's not that big of a problem.
If you are running on a multi-CPU platform you only want one CPU to communicate
with the NIC. Distributing your channels over multiple CPUs will cause cache
thrashing which absolutely tanks performance.
Your NIC will usually configure the channels correctly on boot, so in most of
the cases you don't need to change anything here. You can query the settings
with `ethtool -l $INTERFACE` and update the values like this: `ethtool -L
$INTERFACE combined 63`.
### Ring buffers (ethtool -g)
The ring buffers are queues where the NIC stores your IP packets before they are
sent out to the network (tx) or sent to the CPU (rx). Increasing the ring buffer
sizes can increase network latency a little bit because more packets are getting
buffered before being sent out to the network. But again, at 100 GbE this
happens so fast that the difference is in the order of microseconds, that makes
absolutely no difference to us.
If we can buffer more packets then it means we can transfer more data in bulk
with every clock cycle. So we simply set this to the maximum. For Mellanox cards
the maximum is usually `8192`, but this can vary. Check the maximum values for
your card with `ethtool -g $INTERFACE`.
`ethtool -G $INTERFACE rx 8192 tx 8192`
### Interrupt Coalescing (ethtool -c)
The NIC can't just write your packets to the CPU and expect it to do something
with them. Your CPU needs to be made aware that there is new data to process.
That happens with interrupts. Ethtool's interrupt coalescing values tell the NIC
when and how to send interrupts to the CPU. This is a delicate balance. We don't
want to interrupt the CPU too often, because then it won't be able to get any
work done. That's like getting a new ping in team chat every half hour, how are
you supposed to concentrate like that? But if we set the interrupt rate too
slow, the NIC won't be able to send all packets in time.
The interrupt coalescing options vary a lot per NIC type.. These are the ones
which are present on my ConnectX-6 Dx: `rx-usecs`, `rx-frames`, `tx-usecs`,
`tx-frames`, `cqe-mode-rx`, `cqe-mode-tx`. I'll explain what these are one by
one:
* `rx-usecs`, `tx-usecs`: These values dictate how often the NIC interrupts the
CPU to receive packets `rx` or send packets `tx`. The value is in
microseconds. The SI prefix for micro is µ, but for convenience they use the
letter u here. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.
* `rx-frames`, `tx-frames`: Like the values above this defines how often the
CPU is interrupted, but instead of interrupting the CPU at fixed moments it
interrupts the CPU when a certain number of packets is in the buffer.
* `cqe-mode-rx`, `cqe-mode-tx`: These options enable packet compression in the
PCI bus. This is handy if your PCI bus is overloaded. In most cases it's best
to leave this at the default value.
* `adaptive-rx`, `adaptive-tx`: These values tell the NIC to calculate its own
interrupt timings. This disregards the values we configure ourselves. The
timings calculated by the NIC often prefer low latency over throughput and
can quickly overwhelm the CPU with interrupts. So for our purposes this needs
to be disabled.
So what are good values for these? Well, we can do some math here. Our NIC can
send 100 Gigabits per second. That's 12.5 GB. A network packet is usually 1500
bytes. This means that we need to send 8333333 packets per second to reach full
speed. Our ring buffer can hold 8192 packets, so if we divide that number again
we learn that we need to send 1017 full ring buffers per second to reach full
speed.
Waiting for the ring buffer to be completely full is probably not a good idea,
since then we can't add more packets until the previous packets have been copied
out. So we want to be able to empty the ring buffer twice. That leaves us with
ring buffers per second. Now convert that buffers per second number to µs per
buffer: `1000000 / 2034 = 492µs`, we land on a value of 492µs per interrupt.
This is our ceiling value. Higher than this and the buffers will overflow. But
492µs is nearly half a millisecond, that's an eternity in CPU time. That's high
enough that it might actually make a measurable difference in packet latency. So
we opt for a safe value of 100µs instead. That still gives the CPU plenty of
time to do other work in between interrupts, but is low enough to barely make a
measurable difference in latency.
As for the `{rx,tx}-frames` variables. We just spent all that time calculating
the ideal interrupt interval, I don't really want the NIC to start interrupting
my CPU when it's not absolutely necessary. So we use the maximum ring buffer
value here: `8192`. Your NIC might not support such high coalescing values. You
can also try setting this to `4096` or `2048` if you notice problems.
That leaves us with this configuration:
```
ethtool -C $INTERFACE adaptive-rx off adaptive-tx off \
rx-usecs 100 tx-usecs 100 \
rx-frames 8192 tx-frames 8192
```
Tip: If you want to see how much time your CPU is spending in handling
interrupts, go into `htop`, then to Setup (F2) and enable "Detailed CPU time"
under Display options. The CPU gauge will now show time spent on handling
interrupts in purple. Press F10 to save changes.
## BIOS
Not even the BIOS is safe from our optimization journey. If fact, some of the
most important optimizations must be configured here.
### NUMA Nodes per socket
Big CPUs with lots of cores often segment their memory into NUMA nodes. These
smaller nodes can coordinate better with each other because they are close to
each other. But one downside is that the segmentation causes performance
problems with NIC queues. Because of this you always need to set `NUMA nodes per
socket` to `NPS1`.
Some AMD BIOSes also have an option called `ACPI SRAT L3 Cache as NUMA Domain`.
This will create NUMA nodes based on the L3 cache topology, *even if you
explicitly disabled NUMA in the memory addressing settings*. To fix this set
`ACPI SRAT L3 Cache as NUMA Domain` to `Disabled`.
### SMT Control
Multithreading (or Hyperthreading, on Intel) can be a performance booster, but
it can also be a performance bottleneck. If you have a CPU with a lot of cores,
like AMD's Epyc lineup, then disabling SMT can be a good way to improve per-core
performance.
Most apps have no way to effectively use hundreds of CPU threads. At some point
adding more threads will only consume more memory and CPU cycles just because
they kernel scheduler and memory controller has to manage all those threads. My
rule of thumb: If you have more than 64 threads: `SMT OFF`
### IOMMU
The [Input-output memory management
unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_memory_management_unit)
is a CPU component for virtualizing your memory access. This can be useful if
you run a lot of VMs for example. You know what it's also good for? **COMPLETELY
DESTROYING NIC PERFORMANCE**.
A high end NIC needs to shuffle a lot of data over the PCI bus. When the IOMMU
is enabled that means that the data needs to be shuffled through the IOMMU first
before it can go into memory. This adds some latency. When you are running a
high end NIC in your PCI slot, then the added latency makes sure that your NIC
will *never ever reach the advertised speed*. In some cases the overhead is so
large that the NIC will effectively drop off the PCI bus, immediately crashing
your system once it gets only slightly overloaded.
Seriously, if you have a high end NIC plugged into your PCI slot and you have
the IOMMU enabled. **You might as well plug a fucking brick into your PCI
slot**, because that's about how useful your expensive NIC will be.
It took me way too long to find this information. The difference between IOMMU
off and on is night and day. I am actually **furious** that it took me this long
to discover this. All the NIC tuning guides talk about is tweaking little
ethtool params and shit like that, the IOMMU was completely omitted. I was
getting so desperate with my terrible NIC performance that I just started
flipping toggles in the BIOS to see if anything made a difference, that's how I
discovered that the IOMMU was the source of **all my problems**.
So yea... `AMD CBS > NBIO Common Options > IOMMU > Disabled` ...AND STAY DOWN!
You can verify that your IOMMU is disabled with this command `dmesg | grep
iommu`. Your IOMMU is disabled if it prints something along the lines of:
```
[ 1.302786] iommu: Default domain type: Translated
[ 1.302786] iommu: DMA domain TLB invalidation policy: lazy mode
```
If you see more output than that, you need to drop into the BIOS and nuke that
shit immediately.
## Reverse proxy
A lot of sites run behind a reverse proxy like nginx or Caddy. It seems to be an
industry standard nowadays. People are surprised when they learn that pixeldrain
does not use a web server like nginx or Caddy.
Turns out that 100 Gigabit per second is a lot of data. It takes a considerable
amount of CPU time to churn through that much data, so ideally you want to touch
it as few times as you can. And when you are moving that much data the memcpy
overhead really starts to show its true face. At this scale playing hot potato
with your HTTP requests is a really bad idea.
A big bottleneck with networking on Linux is copying data across the kernel
boundary. The kernel always needs to copy your buffers because userspace is
dirty, would not want to share memory with that. When you are running a reverse
proxy every request is effectively crossing the kernel boundary *six times*.
Let's assume we're running nginx here, the client sends a request to the server.
The kernel copies the request body from kernel space to nginx's listener (from
kernel space to userspace), nginx opens a request to your app and copies the
body the to localhost TCP socket (back to kernel space). The kernel sends the
body to your app's listener on localhost (now it's in userspace again). And then
the response body follows the same path again. Request: NIC -> kernel ->
userspace -> kernel -> userspace. Response: userspace -> kernel -> userspace ->
kernel -> NIC. That's crazy inefficient.
That's why pixeldrain just uses Go's built in HTTP server. Go's HTTP server is
very complete. Everything you need is there:
* [Routing](https://github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter)
* [TLS (for HTTPS)](https://pkg.go.dev/crypto/tls)
* HTTP/2
* Even a [reverse
proxy](https://pkg.go.dev/net/http/httputil#NewSingleHostReverseProxy) if
you're into that kinda stuff
The only requirement is that your app is written in Go. Of course other
languages also have libraries for this.
## Operating system
Choose something up-to-date, light and minimalist. Pixeldrain used to run on
Ubuntu because I was familiar with it, but after a while Ubuntu server got more
bloated and heavy. Unnecessary stuff was being added with each new release
(looking at you snapd), and I just didn't want to deal with that. Eventually I
switched to Debian.
Debian is much better than Ubuntu. After booting it for the first time there
will only be like 10 processes running on the system, just the essentials. It
really is a clean sandbox waiting for you to build a castle in it. It might take
some getting used to, but it will definitely pay off.
## Kernel
You need to run at least kernel 6.1, because of the `net.ipv4.tcp_shrink_window`
sysctl. But generally, **newer is better**. There are dozens of engineers from
Google, Cloudflare and Meta tinkering away at the Linux network stack every day.
It gets better with every release, really, the pace is staggering.
But doesn't Debian ship really old kernel packages? (you might ask) Yes...
kinda. By using [this guide](https://wiki.debian.org/HowToUpgradeKernel) you can
upgrade your kernel version to the `testing` or even the `experimental` branch
while keeping the rest of the OS the same.
On the [Debian package tracker](https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/linux) you can
see which kernel version ships in which repository. This is useful for picking
which repo you want to use for your kernel updates. Pixeldrain gets its kernel
updates from the `testing` branch. These are kernels which have been declared
stable by the kernel developers and are generally safe to use.
Keep an eye on the [Phoronix Linux Networking
blog](https://www.phoronix.com/linux/Linux+Networking) for new kernel features.
Pretty much every kernel version that comes out boasts about huge network
performance wins. I'm personally waiting for Kernel 6.8 to come out. They are
promising a 40% TCP performance boost. Crazy!

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