[New-bugs-announce] [issue27456] TCP_NODELAY

[Jim Fulton]

New submission from Jim Fulton:

tl;dr TCP_NODELAY should be set by default and/or there should be a
      proper way to set it.

I've ported ZEO, ZODB's client-server networking layer to asyncio.
Things were going pretty well.  I've been developing on a
Mac. Yesterday, I ran some performance measurements on Linux and found
some tests ran 30x slower.

After some digging, I came across this:

https://github.com/python/asyncio/issues/311

Then led me to try setting TCP_NODELAY, which provided Linux
performance comparable to Mac OS performance.

Issue 311 suggested that this was a kernal-version issue.  I think
this is a failure to set, or at least provide a way to set a "don't be
stupid" option.

I originally tried this on Ubuntu 14.04, with kernal
3.13.0-74-generic.  I then tried Ubuntu 16.04, in a docker image, with
kernal 4.4.12-boot2docker. For both of these, performance for the
write tests were 30x slower unless I set TCP_NODELAY.

Finally, I tried an Amazon standard AMI, which runs some version of
RedHat, with kernal 4.4.11-23.53.amzn1.x86_64.  On that system,
performance of the tests was similar to Mac OS X without setting
TCP_NODELAY.

Note that the non-slow kernal version was lower than the slow (Ubuntu)
one. I don't think this is mearly a kernal version issue, nor do I
think this should have been dismissed as one.

I couldn't find a way to set TCP_NODELAY cleanly. Did I miss something?
https://github.com/python/asyncio/issues/286 suggests there isn't one.

I ended up having to set the option on _sock transport attributes,
which is dirty and, I assume, won't work with uvloop. (BTW, uvloop was
only ~15x slower on linux systems with this problem.)

I think TCP_NODELAY should be set by default.  Perhaps it shouldn't be
set on mobile, by everywhere else, I think it's a "don't be stupid"
option.

I also think there should be a way to set it cleanly.

IMO, this is extremely important. Linux is a wildly important platform
for networking applications and Python, and, for better or worse,
Ubuntu is a very commonly used distribution.  Having asyncio, perform
so poorly on these platforms is a big deal.

----------
messages: 269826
nosy: j1m
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: TCP_NODELAY

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue27456>
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