I always had thought that collapsing up to two at a time was
intentional decision to avoid excessive processing if 1 byte
sized skbs are to be combined for a full mtu, and consecutive
retransmissions would make the size of the retransmittee
double each round anyway, but some recent discussion made me
to understand that was not the case. Thus make collapse work
more and wait less.
It would be possible to take advantage of the shifting
machinery (added in the later patch) in the case of paged
data but that can be implemented on top of this change.
tcp_skb_is_last check is now provided by the loop.
I tested a bit (ss-after-idle-off, fill 4096x4096B xfer,
10s sleep + 4096 x 1byte writes while dropping them for
some a while with netem):