tc-sfb(8) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | ALGORITHM | LIMITATIONS | PARAMETERS | STATISTICS | NOTES | EXAMPLE & USAGE | SEE ALSO | SOURCES | AUTHORS | COLOPHON

SFB(8)                            Linux                           SFB(8)

NAME         top

       sfb - Stochastic Fair Blue

SYNOPSIS         top

       tc qdisc ... blue rehash milliseconds db milliseconds limit
       packets max packets target packets increment float decrement
       float penalty_rate packets per second penalty_burst packets

DESCRIPTION         top

       Stochastic Fair Blue is a classless qdisc to manage congestion
       based on packet loss and link utilization history while trying to
       prevent non-responsive flows (i.e. flows that do not react to
       congestion marking or dropped packets) from impacting performance
       of responsive flows.  Unlike RED, where the marking probability
       has to be configured, BLUE tries to determine the ideal marking
       probability automatically.

ALGORITHM         top

       The BLUE algorithm maintains a probability which is used to mark
       or drop packets that are to be queued. If the queue overflows,
       the mark/drop probability is increased. If the queue becomes
       empty, the probability is decreased. The Stochastic Fair Blue
       (SFB) algorithm is designed to protect TCP flows against non-
       responsive flows.

       This SFB implementation maintains 8 levels of 16 bins each for
       accounting.  Each flow is mapped into a bin of each level using a
       per-level hash value.

       Every bin maintains a marking probability, which gets increased
       or decreased based on bin occupancy. If the number of packets
       exceeds the size of that bin, the marking probability is
       increased. If the number drops to zero, it is decreased.

       The marking probability is based on the minimum value of all bins
       a flow is mapped into, thus, when a flow does not respond to
       marking or gradual packet drops, the marking probability quickly
       reaches one.

       In this case, the flow is rate-limited to penalty_rate packets
       per second.

LIMITATIONS         top

       Due to SFBs nature, it is possible for responsive flows to share
       all of its bins with a non-responsive flow, causing the
       responsive flow to be misidentified as being non-responsive.

       The probability of a responsive flow to be misidentified is
       dependent on the number of non-responsive flows, M. It is (1 - (1
       - (1 / 16.0)) ** M) **8, so for example with 10 non-responsive
       flows approximately 0.2% of responsive flows will be
       misidentified.

       To mitigate this, SFB performs performs periodic re-hashing to
       avoid misclassification for prolonged periods of time.

       The default hashing method will use source and destination ip
       addresses and port numbers if possible, and also supports
       tunneling protocols.  Alternatively, an external classifier can
       be configured, too.

PARAMETERS         top

       rehash Time interval in milliseconds when queue perturbation
              occurs to avoid erroneously detecting unrelated,
              responsive flows as being part of a non-responsive flow
              for prolonged periods of time.  Defaults to 10 minutes.

       db     Double buffering warmup wait time, in milliseconds.  To
              avoid destroying the probability history when rehashing is
              performed, this implementation maintains a second set of
              levels/bins as described in section 4.4 of the SFB
              reference.  While one set is used to manage the queue, a
              second set is warmed up: Whenever a flow is then
              determined to be non-responsive, the marking probabilities
              in the second set are updated. When the rehashing happens,
              these bins will be used to manage the queue and all non-
              responsive flows can be rate-limited immediately.  This
              value determines how much time has to pass before the 2nd
              set will start to be warmed up.  Defaults to one minute,
              should be lower than rehash.

       limit  Hard limit on the real (not average) total queue size in
              packets.  Further packets are dropped. Defaults to the
              transmit queue length of the device the qdisc is attached
              to.

       max    Maximum length of a buckets queue, in packets, before
              packets start being dropped. Should be slightly larger
              than target , but should not be set to values exceeding
              1.5 times that of target .  Defaults to 25.

       target The desired average bin length. If the bin queue length
              reaches this value, the marking probability is increased
              by increment.  The default value depends on the max
              setting, with max set to 25 target will default to 20.

       increment
              A value used to increase the marking probability when the
              queue appears to be over-used. Must be between 0 and 1.0.
              Defaults to 0.00050.

       decrement
              Value used to decrease the marking probability when the
              queue is found to be empty. Must be between 0 and 1.0.
              Defaults to 0.00005.

       penalty_rate
              The maximum number of packets belonging to flows
              identified as being non-responsive that can be enqueued
              per second. Once this number has been reached, further
              packets of such non-responsive flows are dropped.  Set
              this to a reasonable fraction of your uplink throughput;
              the default value of 10 packets is probably too small.

       penalty_burst
              The number of packets a flow is permitted to exceed the
              penalty rate before packets start being dropped.  Defaults
              to 20 packets.

STATISTICS         top

       This qdisc exposes additional statistics via 'tc -s qdisc'
       output.  These are:

       earlydrop
              The number of packets dropped before a per-flow queue was
              full.

       ratedrop
              The number of packets dropped because of rate-limiting.
              If this value is high, there are many non-reactive flows
              being sent through sfb. In such cases, it might be better
              to embed sfb within a classful qdisc to better control
              such flows using a different, shaping qdisc.

       bucketdrop
              The number of packets dropped because a per-flow queue was
              full.  High bucketdrop may point to a high number of
              aggressive, short-lived flows.

       queuedrop
              The number of packets dropped due to reaching limit. This
              should normally be 0.

       marked The number of packets marked with ECN.

       maxqlen
              The length of the current longest per-flow (virtual)
              queue.

       maxprob
              The maximum per-flow drop probability. 1 means that some
              flows have been detected as non-reactive.

NOTES         top

       SFB automatically enables use of Explicit Congestion Notification
       (ECN).  Also, this SFB implementation does not queue packets
       itself.  Rather, packets are enqueued to the inner qdisc
       (defaults to pfifo).  Because sfb maintains virtual queue states,
       the inner qdisc must not drop a packet previously queued.
       Furthermore, if a buckets queue has a very high marking rate,
       this implementation will start dropping packets instead of
       marking them, as such a situation points to either bad
       congestion, or an unresponsive flow.

EXAMPLE & USAGE         top

       To attach to interface $DEV, using default options:

       # tc qdisc add dev $DEV handle 1: root sfb

       Only use destination ip addresses for assigning packets to bins,
       perturbing hash results every 10 minutes:

       # tc filter add dev $DEV parent 1: handle 1 flow hash keys dst
       perturb 600

SEE ALSO         top

       tc(8), tc-red(8), tc-sfq(8)

SOURCES         top

       o      W. Feng, D. Kandlur, D. Saha, K. Shin, BLUE: A New Class
              of Active Queue Management Algorithms, U. Michigan CSE-
              TR-387-99, April 1999.

AUTHORS         top

       This SFB implementation was contributed by Juliusz Chroboczek and
       Eric Dumazet.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the iproute2 (utilities for controlling
       TCP/IP networking and traffic) project.  Information about the
       project can be found at 
       ⟨http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/iproute2⟩.
       If you have a bug report for this manual page, send it to
       netdev@vger.kernel.org, shemminger@osdl.org.  This page was
       obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/network/iproute2/iproute2.git⟩ on
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       that was found in the repository was 2023-12-20.)  If you
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iproute2                       August 2011                        SFB(8)

Pages that refer to this page: tc(8)