Re: Bridging Benchmarks

From: David J Duchscher (daved_at_tamu.edu)
Date: 09/17/03

  • Next message: Roger 'Rocky' Vetterberg: "Re: Bridging Benchmarks" 
    Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2003 20:29:37 -0500
To: Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@icir.org>

    On Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 05:12 PM, Luigi Rizzo wrote:

    > On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 04:45:36PM -0500, David J Duchscher wrote:
    >> We have been benchmarking FreeBSD configured as a bridge and I thought
    >> I would share the data that we have been collecting. Its a work in
    >> progress so more data will show up as try some more Ethernet cards and
    >> machine configurations. Everything is 100Mbps at the moment. Would
    >> be
    >> very interested in any thoughts, insights or observations people might
    >> have.
    >>
    >> http://wolf.tamu.edu/~daved/bench-100/
    >
    > interesting results, thanks for sharing them.
    > I would like to add a few comments and suggestions:
    >
    > * as the results with the Gbit card show, the system per se
    > is able to work at wire speed at 100Mbit/s, but some cards and/or
    > drivers have bugs which prevent full-speed operation.
    > Among these, i ran extensive experiments on the Intel PRO/100,
    > and depending on how you program the card, the maximum transmit
    > speed ranges from ~100kpps (with the default driver) to ~120kpps
    > no matter how fast the CPU is. I definitely blame the hardware here.

    We have seen similar results. In a quick test, I didn't see any
    difference
    in the performance of the Intel Pro/100 on a 2.4Ghz Xeon machine. That
    was
    rather surprising to me since lots of people swear by them.

    > * I have had very good results with cards supported by the 'dc'
    > driver (Intel 21143 chipset and various clones) -- wire speed even
    > at 64-byte frames. Possibly the 'sis' chips might do the same.
    > I know the 'dc' cards are hard to find these days, but i would
    > definitely try one of them if possible.
    > I would also love to see numbers with the 'rl' cards (Realtek8139,
    > most of the cards you find around in the stores) which are
    > probably among the slowest ones we have.

    Yea, I trying to find cards to test but its hard. I can only purchase
    cards
    that help with the project. For example, I will be testing the Intel
    Pro/1000T
    Desktop Adapters since the gigabit cards have shown to be full
    bandwidth.

    > * the "latency" curves for some of the cards are quite strange
    > (making me suspect bugs in the drivers or the like).
    > How do you define the 'latency', how do you measure it, and do
    > you know if it is affected by changing "options HZ=..." in your
    > kernel config file (default is 100, i usually recommend using
    > 1000) ?

    All of this data is coming from a Anritsu MD1230A test unit running
    the RFC2544 Performance tests.

       http://snurl.com/2d9x

    Currently the kernel HZ value is set to 1000. I have it on my list of
    things to change and perform the tests again.

    > * especially under heavy load (e.g. when using bridge_ipfw=1 and
    > largish rulesets), you might want to build a kernel with
    > options DEVICE_POLLING and do a 'sysctl kern.polling.enable=1'
    > (see "man polling" for other options you should use).
    > It would be great to have the graphs with and without polling,
    > and also with/without bridge_ipfw (even with a simple one-line
    > firewall config) to get an idea of the overhead.
    >
    > The use of polling should prevent the throughput dip after
    > the box reaches the its throughput limit visible in some
    > of the 'Frame loss' graphs.
    >
    > Polling support is available for a number of cards including
    > 'dc', 'em', 'sis', 'fxp' and possibly a few others.

    DEVICE_POLLING is high on the lists of things to test. It looks like
    its going to be a requirement since all of these cards have livelocked
    the machine at some point during testing. I tried SMC cards today and
    the machine overloads so much it stops responding long enough for the
    testing to fail.

    Thanks for all the input. I am really hoping to get some useful numbers
    that others can use.

    DaveD

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  • Next message: Roger 'Rocky' Vetterberg: "Re: Bridging Benchmarks"

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