Re: Tuning Gigabit

From: Nick Evans (nevans_at_talkpoint.com)
Date: 06/29/03

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    Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2003 11:36:22 -0400
To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org

    On Sun, 29 Jun 2003 07:58:27 -0400
    Christian Brueffer <chris@unixpages.org> wrote:

    > On Sat, Jun 28, 2003 at 10:05:56PM -0400, David Gilbert wrote:
    > > >>>>> "Gregory" == Gregory Sutter <gsutter@zer0.org> writes:
    > >
    > > Gregory> Will you please summarize the motherboard performance data so
    > > Gregory> we know which boards to buy and which to skip? Thanks.
    > >
    > > I've been working on such a summary. So far, the 'nvidia' chipset
    > > boards have all tested badly. They couldn't be coaxed to pass more
    > > than 100meg of traffic by any means we could discern.
    > >
    > > The K7S5A has been our mainstay. Many of them are DOA, but the ones
    > > that pass a couple weeks of cpuburn (see port) ... both on cpu and
    > > memory tests ... work amazingly well. These boards are limited to 300
    > > megabit total thruput by being a 33Mhz 32bit PCI bus.
    > >
    > > We've been testing mainly Athlon boards ... we havn't seen good P4
    > > boards ... but most of the boards we've had through for the P4 have
    > > been workstation and not server boards.
    > >
    > > The tiger tyan MPX is a dual board with 64 bit slots. I havn't had
    > > time to fully benchmark it becuase we use it as a fairly primary
    > > database server ... but it has generally been able to perform at or
    > > near the top of the class.
    > >
    > > There is an ASUS dusl board with 32-bit only slots and the AMD 76x
    > > chipset (unfortunately it's far away and I can't look at it). it's
    > > 32-bit slots run at 66Mhz and have extrodinarily good thruput.
    > > AFAICT, it's currently out of production ... but the dual board on the
    > > ASUS site looks very good.
    > >
    >
    > If you're talking about the ASUS A7M266-D, it actually has two 64bit
    > PCI slots (powering a SCSI controller and a NIC here).
    > It runs extremely well so far.
    >
    > - Christian
    >
    > --
    > Christian Brueffer chris@unixpages.org brueffer@FreeBSD.org
    > GPG Key: http://people.freebsd.org/~brueffer/brueffer.key.asc
    > GPG Fingerprint: A5C8 2099 19FF AACA F41B B29B 6C76 178C A0ED 982D

    I recently tested a Compaq DL380, 733Mhz processor, 512meg ram with two fiber 64-bit Intel Pro 1000's. The system (4.8-R) forwarded 500 megabits at about 20% idle with IPFilter loaded but with no rules. The system uses a ServerWorks chipset and has several 64-bit pci slots. I used netperf on several systems on either side of the firewall. In the next week or so I'll be testing two Pentium 4 2.4 gig systems with ServerWorks chipsets using a much larger cluster of load applying systems. I'll post those results.

    When I tested the same configuration on a Compaq 1850R (450Mhz, i440BX, 32-bit PCI) I could only muster about 250-270 megabits of traffic. I figured the PCI bus was the limiting factor and stepped up to the DL380.

    Previously I've forwarded 50,000 packets per second on a Celeron 900Mhz, Intel 810 chipset, 32-bit PCI (4.4-R) system with IPFilter loaded and IIRC 150 rules in effect. The system used Intel PRO/100S dual port server adapters. I used ping -f for those tests.

    I have access to about 25-30 systems to apply load with so if anyone wants something specific tested I might be able to work it into my schedule.

    Nick

    -------------------------------
    nick.evans
    network.engineering
    talkpoint communications, inc.
    land 212.909.2967
    cell
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