Re: Weird "ignoring syn" problem

In response to Bill Moran <wmoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

In response to Adam McDougall <mcdouga9@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 10:19:49AM -0400, Bill Moran wrote:


This one has got me pretty befuddled.

We're seeing some really odd behaviour with FreeBSD ignoring SYN packets.
I've been trying to diagnose this for a couple of weeks now, and my current
guess is that there's something wrong with the em driver. Here's a narrowed
down list of what I've ruled out:
*) I've done my best to eliminate other network components as the problem.
My theory at this point is that it can't possibly be any other network
hardware, based on the tcpdump show below.
*) The problem occurred on both FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 6.2-p3.
*) The problem does not appear to be tied to CPU usage -- the CPU is nearly
idle when the problem occurs.
*) I can now reproduce it pretty easily, so I'll know when it's fixed.
*) The system exhibiting the problem is running 15 jails, but they are
idle 95% of the time. The problem initially occurred inside one of
the jails, but I just recreated it outside the jail (on the host) and
it's _easier_ to reproduce outside the jail.
*) The problem occurred with both GENERIC, and the SMP kernel (this is a
dual-CPU, hyperthreaded system)
*) I've tested and the behavior occurs both with a dynamically generated
file (from PHP) or from a static file.

The nature of the beast is that we've got a SOAP application running under
Apache and PHP. This application is subject to many requests in rapid
succession, such that load can be simulated by the following loop:

while true; do fetch http://192.168.121.250/test.php; done

The problem is that occasionally, the Apache server machine just ignores
SYN packets. Take the following tcpdump output for example:

13:34:17.312296 IP web04-v100.cust00.pitbpa1.priv.collaborativefusion.com.54808 > anchor-is00.is.pitbpa1.priv.collaborativefusion.com.http: S 2645061726:2645061726(0) win 65535 <mss 1380,nop,wscale 1,nop,nop,timestamp 2690201156 0,sackOK,eol>
13:34:20.312398 IP web04-v100.cust00.pitbpa1.priv.collaborativefusion.com.54808 > anchor-is00.is.pitbpa1.priv.collaborativefusion.com.http: S 2645061726:2645061726(0) win 65535 <mss 1380,nop,wscale 1,nop,nop,timestamp 2690204156 0,sackOK,eol>
13:34:23.512626 IP web04-v100.cust00.pitbpa1.priv.collaborativefusion.com.54808 > anchor-is00.is.pitbpa1.priv.collaborativefusion.com.http: S 2645061726:2645061726(0) win 65535 <mss 1380,nop,wscale 1,nop,nop,timestamp 2690207356 0,sackOK,eol>

This is the _only_ traffic on port 80 during the test. It looks like the
kernel has ignored the initial syn packet and two duplicates. I've seen it
take as long as 45 seconds to establish a connection, and this causes
ugly performance problems, as well as frequent timeouts on the client end.
The only clue I've found so far is this output from netstat -s.


Does the Apache server have a firewall of any sort? (Could be making unexpected
decisions there, even not part of a fw rule)

Try net.inet.ip.portrange.randomized=0 on the client? (If this is the problem,
we would probably see a reused port if you had a tcpdump of a few minutes
if started after waiting for several minutes of "silence")

Are both systems on the same subnet? If not, can/have you tried that?

No, they aren't. My ability to test on the same subnet is limited and
the results inconclusive.

Can you show tcpdump output using -e on the requests that aren't answered
as well as an example that IS answered? (I have seen routers mess up the MAC
addresses for the source and destination and if I kept staring at layer 3
data all day I might never have seen the problem)

Better yet, can you post files containing tcpdump output using -w of an entire
session that ideally contains failed attempts that eventually work? That way
people could look at a broader picture and perhaps pick up on something subtle.
Its worth comparing a SYN that works, directly with a SYN that doesn't work.

We've decided to swap the card out on Friday and see if that resolves the
problem. We have similar units that don't exhibit the problem, so I'm
getting pretty suspicious that this might be a flaky NIC. If the new
card doesn't solve the problem, I'll post more details on Monday.

Just in case someone was curious as to the result, or finds this on a web
search.

The behaviour was apparently hardware related. We swapped the NIC out and
can no longer reproduce the problem.

--
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.
http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/

wmoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Phone: 412-422-3463x4023
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