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Date:      Wed, 20 Apr 2005 00:12:00 +0300
From:      Petri Helenius <pete@he.iki.fi>
To:        Eivind Hestnes <eivind@stabbursmoen.no>
Cc:        performance@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Performance Intel Pro 1000 MT (PWLA8490MT)
Message-ID:  <42657420.3040104@he.iki.fi>
In-Reply-To: <4265724A.1040705@stabbursmoen.no>
References:  <20050419183335.F18008131@joshua.stabbursmoen.no> <42655887.7060203@alumni.rice.edu> <4265724A.1040705@stabbursmoen.no>

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Eivind Hestnes wrote:

> It's correct that the card is plugged into a 32-bit 33 Mhz PCI slot. 
> If i'm not wrong, 33 Mhz PCI slots has a peak transfer rate of 133 
> MByte/s. However, when pulling 180 mbit/s without the polling enabled 
> the system is very little responsive due to the interrupt load.  I'll 
> try to increase the polling frequency too see if this increases the 
> bandwidth with polling enabled.. Thanks for the advice btw..
>
There is something "interesting" going on in the em driver but I haven't 
had the time to profile it properly and Intel has been less than 
forthcoming with the specification which makes it more challenging to 
try to optimize the driver further.

Pete

> - E.
>
> Jon Noack wrote:
>
>> On 4/19/2005 1:32 PM, Eivind Hestnes wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>> The card is plugged into a 32-bit PCI slot, correct?  If so, 180 
>> Mbit/s is decent.  I have a gigabit LAN at home using Pro 1000 MTs 
>> (in 32-bit PCI slots) and get NFS transfers maxing out around 23 
>> MB/s, which is ~180 Mbit/s.  Gigabit performance with 32-bit cards is 
>> atrocious.  It reminds me of the old 100 Mbit/s ISA cards...
>>
>>> <snip>
>>>
>>> HZ set to 1000 as recommended in README for the em(4) driver. Driver 
>>> is of
>>> cource compiled into kernel.
>>
>>
>>
>> You'll need HZ set to more than 1000 for gigabit; bump it up to at 
>> least 2000.  That should increase polling throughput a lot.  I'm not 
>> sure about other polling parameters, however.
>>
>> Jon
>
>
>
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