4.2. Prioritizing Network Traffic
When running multiple network-related services on a single server system, it is important to define network priorities among these services. Defining the priorities ensures that packets originating from certain services have a higher priority than packets originating from other services. For example, such priorities are useful when a server system simultaneously functions as an NFS and Samba server. The NFS traffic has to be of high priority as users expect high throughput. The Samba traffic can be deprioritized to allow better performance of the NFS server.
The
net_prio
controller can be used to set network priorities for processes in cgroups. These priorities are then translated into Type of Service (ToS) field bits and embedded into every packet. Follow the steps in Procedure 4.2, “Setting Network Priorities for File Sharing Services” to configure prioritization of two file sharing services (NFS and Samba).
Procedure 4.2. Setting Network Priorities for File Sharing Services
- Attach the
net_prio
subsystem to the/cgroup/net_prio
cgroup:mkdir sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio mount -t cgroup -o net_prio none sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio
~]# mkdir sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio ~]# mount -t cgroup -o net_prio none sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio
Copy to Clipboard Copied! - Create two cgroups, one for each service:
mkdir sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio/nfs_high mkdir sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio/samba_low
~]# mkdir sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio/nfs_high ~]# mkdir sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio/samba_low
Copy to Clipboard Copied! - To automatically move the
nfs
services to thenfs_high
cgroup, add the following line to the/etc/sysconfig/nfs
file:CGROUP_DAEMON="net_prio:nfs_high"
CGROUP_DAEMON="net_prio:nfs_high"
Copy to Clipboard Copied! This configuration ensures thatnfs
service processes are moved to thenfs_high
cgroup when thenfs
service is started or restarted. - The
smbd
service does not have a configuration file in the/etc/sysconfig
directory. To automatically move thesmbd
service to thesamba_low
cgroup, add the following line to the/etc/cgrules.conf
file:*:smbd net_prio samba_low
*:smbd net_prio samba_low
Copy to Clipboard Copied! Note that this rule moves everysmbd
service, not only/usr/sbin/smbd
, into thesamba_low
cgroup.You can define rules for thenmbd
andwinbindd
services to be moved to thesamba_low
cgroup in a similar way. - Start the
cgred
service to load the configuration from the previous step:systemctl start cgred
~]# systemctl start cgred Starting CGroup Rules Engine Daemon: [ OK ]
Copy to Clipboard Copied! - For the purposes of this example, let us assume both services use the
eth1
network interface. Define network priorities for each cgroup, where1
denotes low priority and10
denotes high priority:echo "eth1 1" > /sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio/samba_low/net_prio.ifpriomap echo "eth1 10" > /sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio/nfs_high/net_prio.ifpriomap
~]# echo "eth1 1" > /sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio/samba_low/net_prio.ifpriomap ~]# echo "eth1 10" > /sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio/nfs_high/net_prio.ifpriomap
Copy to Clipboard Copied! - Start the
nfs
andsmb
services and check whether their processes have been moved into the correct cgroups:systemctl start smb cat /sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio/samba_low/tasks systemctl start nfs cat sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio/nfs_high/tasks
~]# systemctl start smb Starting SMB services: [ OK ] ~]# cat /sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio/samba_low/tasks 16122 16124 ~]# systemctl start nfs Starting NFS services: [ OK ] Starting NFS quotas: [ OK ] Starting NFS mountd: [ OK ] Stopping RPC idmapd: [ OK ] Starting RPC idmapd: [ OK ] Starting NFS daemon: [ OK ] ~]# cat sys/fs/cgroup/net_prio/nfs_high/tasks 16321 16325 16376
Copy to Clipboard Copied! Network traffic originating from NFS now has higher priority than traffic originating from Samba.
Similar to Procedure 4.2, “Setting Network Priorities for File Sharing Services”, the
net_prio
subsystem can be used to set network priorities for client applications, for example, Firefox.