In general, we approximate the advertised window to zero if we would
otherwise advertise less than a MSS worth, and the reasoning behind
that is explained in cf1925fb7b77 ("tcp: Don't limit window to
less-than-MSS values, use zero instead").
Then, in commit b40f5cd8c8e1 ("tcp: Use less-than-MSS window on no
queued data, or no data sent recently"), I introduced some conditions
under which we won't do that, including a check on whether any data
was sent recently.
As an arbitrary but probably reasonable threshold, we consider data to
have recently been sent if that occurred less than ten times the
round-trip time (RTT) ago.
The time elapsed since the last data transmission is reported by the
kernel in milliseconds, in the tcpi_last_data_sent field of struct
tcp_info, and the RTT is reported in microseconds instead, in
tcpi_rtt.
To avoid the risk of overflow in a simple way, for the purpose of this
comparison, I converted tcpi_rtt to milliseconds first, but this means
that the check will always be false (and we'll never approximate the
window to zero) if the RTT is below one millisecond.
This, in turn, reintroduces nasty delay issues in transfers in
non-local connections which have however almost-local (low) latency.
Given that we want to use ten times the RTT as an arbitrary "long
enough" upper bound, round the RTT up while converting it to
milliseconds.
As an alternative, we could perform the comparison in microseconds,
but we would need a slightly more complicated implementation to
exclude overflows, and it's definitely not worth it given the nature
of this threshold.
Fixes: b40f5cd8c8e1 ("tcp: Use less-than-MSS window on no queued data, or no data sent recently")
Signed-off-by: Stefano Brivio