A TCP socket buffer auto-tuning daemon

Abstract

Depending on the bandwidth and round trip time of a network path, certain network connections may need different socket buffers than others. However, most TCP implementations use default socket buffer size for all the connections. This leads to a wastage of kernel memory for low bandwidth, long round trip time network paths and inefficiency for long fat W. Rechard Stevens (1994) network paths. To tackle this problem, we implement a TCP socket buffer auto-tuning daemon. It will periodically tune the socket buffer size of each connection to an optimal value according to the network status of each connection, without the intervention of user or change of network application. The tuning daemon can run on different machines and communicate with each other, send tuning request to the remote daemon and exchange the tuning information. Experiment results are presented to show that this daemon can improve the throughput for network application.