High Performance SSH/SCP - HPN-SSH when?

[Chris Rapier]

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Mar 25 23:37, Chris Rapier wrote:
>> [http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/]
>> Development is on going and new version of the patch will be available 
>> shortly. This new version of the patch will hopefully address a 
>> performance issue in LAN transfers.
> 
> Not sure if it's ok to discuss this here. However, we have some
> performance problems on Cygwin with the vanilla version of OpenSSH.  The
> main problem is the size of the read buffers in the client loop, resp.
> client_process_net_input/client_process_input.  The buffer size is a
> fixed 8K.  For some reason this degrades performance on Windows
> enormously, when a copy is made from a remote machine to the local
> machine, like this:

I'm guessing that this is probably an issue in the implementation of 
cygwin. Following the code I would again guess that its probably the 
memcpy in buffer_append doing it. Perhaps many small memcpy's being more 
expensive than a few larger ones in the cygwin environment? Is there 
some sort of trace functionality under cygwin?


> I also tried the HPN patch, but it doesn't help for this specific
> situation.  The HPN patch does not touch the application's read buffer
> size and it turns out that neither changing the underlying SO_RCVBUF
> buffer sizes nor changing TCP_NODELAY have a really relaxing effect on
> this situation (less than 10%).  
> 
> On the contrary, keeping the application buffers at 8K, the performance
> even degrades with the HPN patch:
> 
>   cygwin> scp linux:file .
>   file   100%  118MB   1.0MB/s   01:58

So this is an additional decrease in performance if the HPN patch is 
used with 8k buffers? What can you tell me about the path? Does it have 
a very low RTT? The available version of HPN (HPN11) polls the SO_RCVBUF 
once every window so in low RTT environments the additional cycles spent 
on this could have an impact. The beta version of the patch (HPN12) 
provides a switch to disabled buffer polling. I'm still working on this 
issue (recreating the problems consistently has been an issue for me) 
but you might want to look at the HPN12 patch set.