methods called Vestigial Time-Wait (VTW) and Maximum Segment Lifetime
Truncation (MSLT).
MSLT and VTW were contributed by Coyote Point Systems, Inc.
Even after a TCP session enters the TIME_WAIT state, its corresponding
socket and protocol control blocks (PCBs) stick around until the TCP
Maximum Segment Lifetime (MSL) expires. On a host whose workload
necessarily creates and closes down many TCP sockets, the sockets & PCBs
for TCP sessions in TIME_WAIT state amount to many megabytes of dead
weight in RAM.
Maximum Segment Lifetimes Truncation (MSLT) assigns each TCP session to
a class based on the nearness of the peer. Corresponding to each class
is an MSL, and a session uses the MSL of its class. The classes are
loopback (local host equals remote host), local (local host and remote
host are on the same link/subnet), and remote (local host and remote
host communicate via one or more gateways). Classes corresponding to
nearer peers have lower MSLs by default: 2 seconds for loopback, 10
seconds for local, 60 seconds for remote. Loopback and local sessions
expire more quickly when MSLT is used.
Vestigial Time-Wait (VTW) replaces a TIME_WAIT session's PCB/socket
dead weight with a compact representation of the session, called a
"vestigial PCB". VTW data structures are designed to be very fast and
memory-efficient: for fast insertion and lookup of vestigial PCBs,
the PCBs are stored in a hash table that is designed to minimize the
number of cacheline visits per lookup/insertion. The memory both
for vestigial PCBs and for elements of the PCB hashtable come from
fixed-size pools, and linked data structures exploit this to conserve
memory by representing references with a narrow index/offset from the
start of a pool instead of a pointer. When space for new vestigial PCBs
runs out, VTW makes room by discarding old vestigial PCBs, oldest first.
VTW cooperates with MSLT.
It may help to think of VTW as a "FIN cache" by analogy to the SYN
cache.
A 2.8-GHz Pentium 4 running a test workload that creates TIME_WAIT
sessions as fast as it can is approximately 17% idle when VTW is active
versus 0% idle when VTW is inactive. It has 103 megabytes more free RAM
when VTW is active (approximately 64k vestigial PCBs are created) than
when it is inactive.
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