SFB(8)                                                                 Linux                                                                SFB(8)

NAME

       sfb - Stochastic Fair Blue

SYNOPSIS

       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

       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  automati-
       cally.

ALGORITHM

       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

       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  proto-
       cols.  Alternatively, an external classifier can be configured, too.

PARAMETERS

       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 sightly 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 num-
              ber 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

       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

       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
       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

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

SOURCES

       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

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

iproute2                                                            August 2011                                                             SFB(8)