From 0a758095c40ae1b32dc5052a706a16c2d9ac5742 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001

From: Salvador Fandino <sfandino@yahoo.com>

Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 11:58:55 +0200

Subject: [PATCH 10/11] Set default window size to 2MB

The default channel window size used until now was 256KB. This value is

too small and results on a bottleneck on real-life networks where

round-trip delays can easily reach 300ms.

The issue was not visible because the configured channel window size

was being ignored and a hard-coded value of ~22MB being used instead,

but that was fixed on a previous commit.

This patch just changes the default window size

(LIBSSH2_CHANNEL_WINDOW_DEFAULT) to 2MB. It is the same value used by

OpenSSH and in our opinion represents a good compromise between memory

used and transfer speed.

Performance tests were run to determine the optimum value. The details

and related discussion are available from the following thread on the

libssh2 mailing-list:

http://www.libssh2.org/mail/libssh2-devel-archive-2013-10/0018.shtml

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.ssh.libssh2.devel/6543

An excerpt follows:

"I have been running some transfer test and measuring their speed.

My setup was composed of a quad-core Linux machine running Ubuntu 13.10

x86_64 with a LXC container inside. The data transfers were performed

from the container to the host (never crossing through a physical

network device).

Network delays were simulated using the tc tool. And ping was used to

verify that they worked as intended during the tests.

The operation performed was the equivalent to the following ssh command:

  $ ssh container "dd bs=16K count=8K if=/dev/zero" >/dev/null

Though, establishment and closing of the SSH connection was excluded

from the timings.

I run the tests several times transferring files of sizes up to 128MB

and the results were consistent between runs.

The results corresponding to the 128MB transfer are available here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao1yRmX6PQQzdG5wSFlrZl9HRWNET3ZyN0hnaGo5ZFE&usp=sharing

It clearly shows that 256KB is too small as the default window size.

Moving to a 512MB generates a great improvement and after the 1MB mark

the returns rapidly diminish. Other factors (TCP window size, probably)

become more limiting than the channel window size

For comparison I also performed the same transfers using OpenSSH. Its

speed is usually on par with that of libssh2 using a window size of 1MB

(even if it uses a 2MB window, maybe it is less aggressive sending the

window adjust msgs)."

Signed-off-by: Salvador Fandino <sfandino@yahoo.com>

[upstream commit 85a827d1bceb9abd4442f225dd7c65ef5cefdc32]

Signed-off-by: Kamil Dudka <kdudka@redhat.com>

---

 include/libssh2.h |    2 +-

 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

diff --git a/include/libssh2.h b/include/libssh2.h

index 9b1a6e1..df873fc 100644

--- a/include/libssh2.h

+++ b/include/libssh2.h

@@ -587,7 +587,7 @@ LIBSSH2_API int libssh2_poll(LIBSSH2_POLLFD *fds, unsigned int nfds,

                              long timeout);

 /* Channel API */

-#define LIBSSH2_CHANNEL_WINDOW_DEFAULT  (256*1024)

+#define LIBSSH2_CHANNEL_WINDOW_DEFAULT  (2*1024*1024)

 #define LIBSSH2_CHANNEL_PACKET_DEFAULT  32768

 #define LIBSSH2_CHANNEL_MINADJUST       1024

-- 

1.7.1