igb broken? Unexplained weirdness with intel 82576 nics on a supermicro board.

[Jack Vogel]

Looks like something to do with system C, you might isolate it, and try a
back
to back connection with its NICs, change cables, look at BIOS settings,
change
the slot the nic is in... All just off the top of my head.

Jack


On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:41 AM, joe <joe at hostedcontent.com> wrote:

> On 05/08/2010 11:17 AM, Ian FREISLICH wrote:
>
>> joe wrote:
>>
>>> On 05/08/2010 06:55 AM, Ian FREISLICH wrote:
>>>
>>>> joe wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>       I have just tried your suggeston and it has no effect for me ;(
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Do you have another brand of NIC that you can try?  At least that
>>>> will isolate whether it's igb(4) or something else.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I will grab a new nic today and try...my options are limited though.
>>> Here are the nics i can get my hands on
>>>
>>> TP-LINK TL-TG3468, 10/100/1000Mbps PCIe Adapter (supported by fbsd?)
>>>
>>
>> Based on the RTL8168B chip.  Should be supported by the re(4) driver.
>>
>>  Intel (EXPI9301CT) Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter (yet another intel nic)
>>>
>>
>> i82574L chip.  Should be supported by the em(4) driver.  I have had
>> good performance in the past with this driver and less than
>> satisfactory performance with the igb(4) driver.
>>
>> That may not be your problem though.  Before you go out and buy,
>> have a look at the amount of interrupt time your slow machine spends
>> in 'top' or 'systat -vm'.  systat will also show the interrupt rate
>> for each driver, perhaps it's not doing interrupt moderation properly.
>> This will manifest as more than about a 1000 per second.  There are
>> loader tunables for the driver to increase the number of transfer
>> descriptors and to tune interrupt moderation.
>>
>> You could try running trafshow (port) on the interface while
>> performing the transfer.  Perhaps promiscuous mode will turn off
>> some hardware feature that will improve things.  It may however
>> break hardware vlanning as it does on my 82575GB 4 port igb card.
>>
>> Ian
>>
>> --
>> Ian Freislich
>>
>
> I bought those two cards anyways, im in a rush to figure out this problem.
> That being said i am still encountering the exact same problem regardless on
> which network card i am running. I am at a complete loss. I am about to try
> a raid card to see if the problem might lay within the onboard sata ports. I
> did pull the server and brought it home so that i can test more things
> quicker.
>
> I am going to try using a raid card instead of the onboard sata ports and
> see if i still encounter the same problem. I would love any suggestions you
> may have on where to go from here to figure out where the problem might be.
>
> joe
>
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