DCMTK and 10 Gb/s

During testing on 10 Gb/s network with the tools mentioned in the previous post I experienced very low bandwidth usage during the tests: ~ 1.5 Gb/s instead of the 8 Gb/s I measured with IPerf and with my own Java tool for network transfer speed measurement.

Investigation showed that DCMTK unfortunately always set TCP send and receive buffers by setsoc

bufLen = 65536; // a socket buffer size of 64K gives best throughput for image transmission
...
setsockopt(sock, SOL_SOCKET, SO_SNDBUF, (char *) &bufLen, sizeof(bufLen));    (void) setsockopt(sock, SOL_SOCKET, SO_RCVBUF, (char *) &bufLen, sizeof(bufLen));

This was probably good approach before TCP autotuning was introduced, but since it is available in newer kernels (>2.6) setting SO_SNDBUF or SO_RCVBUF is switching off the TCP autotune feature that results terrible performance over 10 Gb/s (see https://www.psc.edu/index.php/networking/641-tcp-tune)


When I commented out these setsockopt lines in
./dcmnet/libsrc/dulfsm.cc
./dcmnet/libsrc/dul.cc
the newly built tools could reach ~5.2 Gb/s bandwidth utilization.