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Date:      Mon, 27 Nov 2000 22:40:03 +0100 (CET)
From:      Ferdinand Goldmann <ferdl@atommuell.oeh.uni-linz.ac.at>
To:        freebsd-net@freebsd.org
Subject:   Strange lockups with Dummynet
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0011272136540.90661-100000@atommuell.oeh.uni-linz.ac.at>

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Hello.

I am experiencing strange crashes on a machine which is being heavily used
as a traffic shaper serving about 300 clients. The machine itsself is just
an old Pentium machine, NICs are:

tx0: <SMC EtherPower II 10/100> port 0x6200-0x62ff mem 0xe1000000-0xe1000fff irq 11 at device 18.0 on pci0
miibus0: <MII bus> on tx0
nsphy0: <QS6612 10/100 media interface> on miibus0
nsphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
tx0: address 00:e0:29:39:bb:ab, type SMC9432BTX
xl0: <3Com 3c905C-TX Fast Etherlink XL> port 0x6300-0x637f mem 0xe1001000-0xe100107f irq 9 at device 19.0 on pci0
xl0: Ethernet address: 00:50:da:0d:a8:a7
miibus1: <MII bus> on xl0
xlphy0: <3c905C 10/100 internal PHY> on miibus1
xlphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto

Occasionally, I see these in the logs: (I hear this is due to hardware being
too slow to respond to feed the NIC, which could be possible (P166))

xl0: transmission error: 90
xl0: tx underrun, increasing tx start threshold to 120 bytes

I have set the following kernel parameters:
maxusers        96
options         NMBCLUSTERS=4096

I beefed up NMBCLUSTERS because FreeBSD ran out of them with the default
setting.

Currently:
# netstat -m
637/1472/16384 mbufs in use (current/peak/max):
187 mbufs allocated to data
450 mbufs allocated to packet headers
186/934/4096 mbuf clusters in use (current/peak/max)
2236 Kbytes allocated to network (23% in use)

I have configured between 3 and 4 pipes on this machine and declared
a small ruleset which should shape the traffic according to my
expectations.

Today, I experienced the following: Upon adding a new pipe definition,
the machine locked maybe an eyeblink after the command was set off.
I.e., the machine was not ping'able anymore, and the console was
dead. However, the activity LEDs of the NICs were still flashing.
No kernel entries, nothing...
This has happened already once after rising the NMBCLUSTERS value.
Being paranoid, I have been logging this value to a file, but it does not
seem to rise significantly before the crash.

[Q]: Can the change of NMBCLUSTERS be the cause for my lockup
problem, or could this be a dummynet problem? How do people running
sites with lots of traffic setting the values of maxusers and
NMBCLUSTERS to be safe, and what would be the maximum value for
maxusers (I heard long it is instable > 128)?
General question, how stable is dummynet under heavy load, any experiences
there?
BTW, the machine is also doing port forwarding of HTTP connects to a proxy.

TIA for any hints,
Ferdinand Goldmann



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