The inet peer storage contains information pertaining to specific peers, or nodes on the Internet. However, it only contains information with a long life expectancy, and information that is not dependant upon routes. For the moment, this means that it only contains information about the ID field for the next outgoing packet. There are a few variables that changes the behaviour of the inet peer storage today, mainly how often garbage collecting is done, as well as how long time to live each peer has in the storage.
The inet_peer_gc_maxtime variable tells the garbage collector how often to pass over the inet peer storage memory pool during low, or absent, memory pressure. This value is in effect under the reversed conditions of the inet_peer_gc_mintime in other words. It works exactly the same as the inet_peer_gc_mintime, except for the fact that it will be in effect under different system loads. This variable is also measured in jiffies, which is explained closer in appendix A.
The inet_peer_gc_maxtime variable takes an integer value and has a default value of 120 jiffies. 120 jiffies should be a good value for most workstations and servers.
The inet_peer_gc_mintime variable sets the minimum time between garbage collections (gc) passes in the inet peer storage under heavy memory pressure. If the system is under heavy utilization and there is a lot of constraints on the memory pool, this timer is used to tell the garbage collector how often to pass over the memory pool used by the inet peer storage, in jiffies. For a complete explanation of jiffies, see appendix A.
The inet_peer_gc_mintime variable takes an integer value and has a default value of 10 jiffies. This should be a fairly good value for most users and servers.
This is the maximum time to live for the inet peer entries. Unused entries will expire after this period of time if there is no memory pressure on the pool. This would in other words mean when the number of entries in the pool is very small, and likely situations.
The inet_peer_maxttl variable takes an integer value, and is measured in jiffies. For a complete explanation of jiffies, see appendix A.
This is the minimum time to live for inet peer entries. This should be set to an high enough value to cover fragment time to live in the reassembling side of fragmented packets. The minimum time to live is guaranteed if the pool size is less than inet_peer_threshold.
The inet_peer_minttl variable takes an integer value, and is measured in jiffies. For a complete explanation of jiffies, see appendix A.
The inet_peer_threshold variable tells the approximate size of the inet peer storage. When this limit is reached, peer entries will be thrown away agressively, using the inet_peer_gc_mintime timeout. This threshold will also determine how long an entry may "live" in the peer storage, in other word it is one of the parts which decides the entries time to live. To put it simple, the higher this value is, the longer the time to live within your system.
This variable takes an integer and defaults to the value 65664 bytes.