Performance Intel Pro 1000 MT (PWLA8490MT)

From: Eivind Hestnes (eivind_at_stabbursmoen.no)
Date: 04/19/05

  • Next message: Jon Noack: "Re: Performance Intel Pro 1000 MT (PWLA8490MT)" 
    To: <performance@FreeBSD.org>
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 20:32:38 +0200

    Hi,

    I have an Intel Pro 1000 MT (PWLA8490MT) NIC (em(4) driver 1.7.35) installed
    in a Pentium III 500 Mhz with 512 MB RAM (100 Mhz) running FreeBSD 5.4-RC3.
    The machine is routing traffic between multiple VLANs. Recently I did a
    benchmark with/without device polling enabled. Without device polling I was
    able to transfer roughly 180 Mbit/s. The router however was suffering when
    doing this benchmark. Interrupt load was peaking 100% - overall the system
    itself was quite unusable (_very_ high system load). With device polling
    enabled the interrupt kept stable around 40-50% and max transfer rate was
    nearly 70 Mbit/s. Not very scientific tests, but it gave me a pin point.

    However, a Pentium III in combination with a good NIC should in my opinion
    be a respectful router.. but I'm not satisfied with the results. The pf
    ruleset is like nothing, and the kernel is stripped and customized for best
    performance.

    Any tweaking tips for making my router perform better?

    Debug information:
    eivind@core-gw:~$ sysctl -a | grep kern.polling
    kern.polling.burst: 150
    kern.polling.each_burst: 5
    kern.polling.burst_max: 150
    kern.polling.idle_poll: 0
    kern.polling.poll_in_trap: 0
    kern.polling.user_frac: 50
    kern.polling.reg_frac: 20
    kern.polling.short_ticks: 1411
    kern.polling.lost_polls: 720
    kern.polling.pending_polls: 0
    kern.polling.residual_burst: 0
    kern.polling.handlers: 0
    kern.polling.enable: 1
    kern.polling.phase: 0
    kern.polling.suspect: 186
    kern.polling.stalled: 0
    kern.polling.idlepoll_sleeping: 1

    eivind@core-gw:~$ cat /etc/sysctl.conf
    net.inet.ip.forwarding=1
    net.inet.ip.fastforwarding=1
    net.inet.carp.preempt=1
    kern.polling.enable=1

    HZ set to 1000 as recommended in README for the em(4) driver. Driver is of
    cource compiled into kernel.

    Regards,
    Eivind Hestnes

    _______________________________________________
    freebsd-performance@freebsd.org mailing list
    http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-performance
    To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-performance-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"

  • Next message: Jon Noack: "Re: Performance Intel Pro 1000 MT (PWLA8490MT)"

    Relevant Pages

    • dummynet, em driver, device polling issues :-((
      ... We are using a 1.2GHz xSeries machine to do poor man's traffic shaping for the ... enabling device polling on the em0 interface. ... now the input errors on the em0 interface were rapidly rising: ... On the mailing list, I have read about performance problems with the em driver, ...
      (freebsd-net)
    • is dev polling support planned for bge ?
      ... I enabled device polling on the em driver and cut the ... network sniffer doing about 320k packetsper sec ... Do you Yahoo!? ...
      (freebsd-net)
    • Re: Device polling support for em and bge
      ... I am running 4.8-RELEASE and I did not see a _poll function in em driver ... Device polling support for em and bge ... > Is there a plan to support device polling for the em or the bge drivers? ...
      (freebsd-net)
    • Re: opt_global.h for kernel modules
      ... while trying to enable device polling in the nge NIC ... activated in the driver, if it's compiled as KLD. ... In this case this leads to different behavior of the driver ...
      (freebsd-current)