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Date:      Wed, 11 Jul 2001 15:33:24 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Mike Silbersack <silby@silby.com>
To:        Martin Karsten <Martin.Karsten@KOM.tu-darmstadt.de>
Cc:        <freebsd-net@freebsd.org>, <oscar@ac.upc.es>
Subject:   Re: UDP packet loss on FreeBSD 4.x
Message-ID:  <20010711153113.L2408-100000@achilles.silby.com>
In-Reply-To: <200107111512.RAA30280@KOM.tu-darmstadt.de>

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On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Martin Karsten wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I have observed the following behaviour on FreeBSD 4.x platforms (4.0 till
> 4.3 seem to be affected).
>
> When receiving a sufficiently fast stream of UDP packets (the borderline
> seems to be around 3,500 packets/sec for e.g. the 'xl' driver on a 450MHz
> Pentium), an application on the receiving host does not receive all packets
> anymore, depending on which nic driver is used. A fraction of the lost
> packets is reported in net.inet.ip.intr_queue_drops, but not all.
>
> Tests have shown that the losses occur for the 'xl' or 'ti' drivers, whereas
> the 'fxp' and 'de' driver don't seem to be affected.

Check the output of netstat -m after doing the test.  I know that the xl
driver puts all incoming packets into mbuf clusters, while the dc driver
goes straight into mbufs if possible.  That might not explain a slowdown
in overall throughput, but it does mean that dc cards have a 4x larger
incoming packet queue than xl cards.

Back to netstat -m.  If you see that your peak number of clusters is
hitting the max, that's partially your answer, and upping the # of mbuf
clusters could help.

Mike "Silby" Silbersack


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