cygrunsrv + sshd + rsync = 20 times too slow -- throttled?

[Chris Roehrig]

On Wed Aug 25 2021, at 10:52 AM, Ken Brown via Cygwin <cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:
> A couple years ago I had an idea for changing the pipe implementation to avoid overlapped I/O:
> 
>  https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin-patches/2019q2/009393.html
>  https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin-patches/2019q2/009423.html
> 
> I never followed up on it.  But if you think it might help with this problem, I could dust it off and try to finish it.
> 
> Ken

I'm not familiar enough with the innards of rsync, sshd or cygwin to know how this would work.
Is it possible to have a new CYGWIN environment option to switch the pipe behaviour without requiring changes to the ssh or rsync source code (and without breaking any existing stuff)?

- Chris



> On 8/25/2021 7:18 AM, Takashi Yano via Cygwin wrote:
>> On Tue, 24 Aug 2021 12:49:52 -0700
>> Chris Roehrig wrote:
>>> I have a network of Windows, Linux and Mac machines and I use rsync to synchronize various directories between them.
>>> 
>>> I'm trying to figure out why my rsync transfers are so slow (<4 MB/s) only when the remote endpoint is Cygwin rsync over sshd (with both a Linux or Cygwin rsync client).   In all other scenarios, I get the full 100MB/s as expected from gigabit ethernet.  This has been an ongoing problem for me for a couple of years over several Windows and Cygwin versions, and I'd like to try to fix it.
>>> 
>>> If I run rsync --daemon --no-detach under mintty in the foreground on the remote Windows endpoint,  I get the full 100 MB/s transfers, so it seems like it has something to do with rsync.exe running in the background under the cygrunsrv+sshd service (which was installed normally using ssh-host-config).
>>> 
>>> If I do:
>>> 	pv /dev/zero | ssh $WINHOST "cat > /dev/null"
>>> or even
>>> 	pv /dev/urandom | ssh $WINHOST md5sum
>>> I also get the full 100 MB/s transfers, so it doesn't look like sshd itself is being throttled by bandwidth or CPU.
>>> 
>>> The machines have less than 15% CPU utilization while transferring, with each of the 4 cores less than 30%, so it doesn't look to be CPU issue.
>>> In Task Manager, sshd.exe and rsync.exe seem to be running normally using only few percent CPU, and show Power Throttling=Disabled, Priority=Normal.   Setting their Priority to High doesn't seem to change things.
>>> 
>>> Looking in Resource Monitor on the remote endpoint, the network usage is pretty much a flat horizontal line at about 18 Mbps (2.5 MB/s), so it sure looks to me as if rsync is somehow being bandwidth-throttled when run in the background under cygsshd.
>>> 
>>> It's almost as if rsync has an implicit --bwlimit override when it is run from cygrunsrv+sshd (I've tried --bwlimit=0 on the client which makes no difference).
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Any ideas?    Not sure where to go from here.
>> In cygwin, just scp is very slow.
>> The transfer speed in my environment is as follows.
>> The tests were done with 100MB of test.dat file.
>> (1-1) From cygwin-PC,
>> [yano@cygwin-PC ~]$ scp test.dat yano@linux-server:.
>> yano@linux-server's password:
>> test.dat                                      100%  100MB   4.0MB/s   00:24
>> [yano@cygwin-PC ~]$ scp yano@linux-server:test.dat .
>> yano@linux-server's password:
>> test.dat                                      100%  100MB   8.0MB/s   00:12
>> (1-2) From linux-server,
>> yano@linux-server:~$ scp yano@cygwin-PC:test.dat .
>> yano@cygwin-PC's password:
>> test.dat                                      100%  100MB   4.0MB/s   00:24
>> yano@linux-server:~$ scp test.dat yano@cygwin-PC:.
>> yano@cygwin-PC's password:
>> test.dat                                      100%  100MB   4.1MB/s   00:24
>> I looked into this problem, and noticed that this is caused
>> by cygwin pipe implementation. Pipe in cygwin is configured
>> with FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED.
>> If the pipe is configured without FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED,
>> the transfer speed is much improved as follows.
>> (2-1) From cygwin-PC,
>> [yano@cygwin-PC ~]$ scp test.dat yano@linux-server:.
>> yano@linux-server's password:
>> test.dat                                      100%  100MB  85.5MB/s   00:01
>> [yano@cygwin-PC ~]$ scp yano@linux-server:test.dat .
>> yano@linux-server's password:
>> test.dat                                      100%  100MB  69.7MB/s   00:01
>> (2-2) From linux-server,
>> yano@linux-server:~$ scp yano@cygwin-PC:test.dat .
>> yano@cygwin-PC's password:
>> test.dat                                      100%  100MB  80.1MB/s   00:01
>> yano@linux-server:~$ scp test.dat yano@cygwin-PC:.
>> yano@cygwin-PC's password:
>> test.dat                                      100%  100MB  57.7MB/s   00:01
>> I am not sure why this happens and how to fix this.
> 
> 
> 
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