Previously, every packet we see gets a lock on the conntrack table and updates it. When running with multiple routines, this can cause heavy lock contention and limit our ability for the threads to run independently. This change caches reads from the conntrack table for a very short period of time to reduce this lock contention. This cache will currently default to disabled unless you are running with multiple routines, in which case the default cache delay will be 1 second. This means that entries in the conntrack table may be up to 1 second out of date and remain in a routine local cache for up to 1 second longer than the global table.
Instead of calling time.Now() for every packet, this cache system relies on a tick thread that updates the current cache "version" each tick. Every packet we check if the cache version is out of date, and reset the cache if so.
This change is for Linux only.
Previously, when running with multiple tun.routines, we would only have one file descriptor. This change instead sets IFF_MULTI_QUEUE and opens a file descriptor for each routine. This allows us to process with multiple threads while preventing out of order packet reception issues.
To attempt to distribute the flows across the queues, we try to write to the tun/UDP queue that corresponds with the one we read from. So if we read a packet from tun queue "2", we will write the outgoing encrypted packet to UDP queue "2". Because of the nature of how multi queue works with flows, a given host tunnel will be sticky to a given routine (so if you try to performance benchmark by only using one tunnel between two hosts, you are only going to be using a max of one thread for each direction).
Because this system works much better when we can correlate flows between the tun and udp routines, we are deprecating the undocumented "tun.routines" and "listen.routines" parameters and introducing a new "routines" parameter that sets the value for both. If you use the old undocumented parameters, the max of the values will be used and a warning logged.
Co-authored-by: Nate Brown <nbrown.us@gmail.com>
We noticed that the number of memory allocations LightHouse.HandleRequest creates for each call can seriously impact performance for high traffic lighthouses. This PR introduces a benchmark in the first commit and then optimizes memory usage by creating a LightHouseHandler struct. This struct allows us to re-use memory between each lighthouse request (one instance per UDP listener go-routine).
Nathan Brown