Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2002 13:41:38 +1000 From: Christopher Smith <csmith@its.uq.edu.au> To: <questions@freebsd.org> Cc: <hardware@freebsd.org>, <net@freebsd.org> Subject: High interrupt load on firewalls Message-ID: <B9C9E292.30E56%csmith@its.uq.edu.au>
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We have two firewalls sitting on gigabit links. Each has 2 Netgear GA620 (ti driver) fibre cards with about 7 vlans spread across them. Both these machines run at *very* high interrupt loads (95 - 100% during business hours (mostly 100%), 80 - 90 % during off hours). They are 1GHz P3 machines (Dell 1550s) with 256MB of RAM. They're actually dual machines, but enabling the second CPU doesn't help in terms of load, it just halves the numbers top reports. Obviously, these machines process a lot of traffic. However, the interrupt load seems to me to be very, very high and the main reason we are seeing such high rates of packet loss (up to 10%, constantly) through these machines - is there any way it can be lessened, either with a better driver, different network cards, or some other way ? We are currently testing with a dual 2.4GHz P4 (Dell 2650) using the same network cards, and are peaking at around 40% (really 80%). However, that doesn't seem to leave much room to grow, and it's a very expensive way to ease the load. Will FreeBSD 5.0 be able to spread the interrupts across both CPUs ? Is this high interrupt load a problem with the driver, the hardware, FreeBSD itself, or is it something that is normal ? What hardware are other people using to firewall high-volume gigabit links ? -- +- Christopher Smith, Systems Administrator ------------------------------+ | Server & Security Group, Information Technology Services | | The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, 4072 | +- Ph +61 7 3365 4046 | email csmith@its.uq.edu.au | Fax +61 7 3365 4065 -+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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