linux - Disable TCP Delayed ACKs

Question

I have an application that receives relatively sparse traffic over TCP with no application-level responses. I believe the TCP stack is sending delayed ACKs (based on glancing at a network packet capture). What is the recommended way to disable delayed-ACK in the network stack for a single socket? I've looked at TCP_QUICKACK, but it seems that the stack will change it under my feet anyways.

This is running on a Linux 2.6 kernel, and I am not worried about portability.

Answer 1

You could setsockopt(sockfd, IPPROTO_TCP, TCP_QUICKACK, (int[]){1}, sizeof(int)) after every recv you perform. It appears that TCP_QUICKACK is only reset when there is data being sent or received; if you're not sending any data, then it will only get reset when you receive data, in which case you can simply set it again.

You can check this in the 14^th field of /proc/net/tcp; if it is not 1, ACKs should be sent immediately... if I'm reading the TCP code correctly. (I'm not an expert at this either.)