Freebsd IP Forwarding performance (question, and some info) [7-stable, current, em, smp]

[Paul]

I tried all of this :/  still, 256/512 descriptors seem to work the best.
Happy to let you log into the machine and fiddle around if you want :)

Paul

Ingo Flaschberger wrote:
> Dear Paul,
>
>>>> what could cause this?
>>>
>>> *) kern.polling.idle_poll enabled?
>>> *) kern.polling.user_frac ?
>>> *) kern.polling.reg_frac ?
>>> *) kern.polling.burst_max ?
>>> *) kern.polling.each_burst ?
>>
>> I tried tons of different values for these and nothing made any 
>> significant difference.
>> Idle polling makes a difference, allows more pps, but still errors.
>> Without idle polling it seems PPS is limited to HZ * descriptors, or 
>> 1000 * 256 or 512
>> but 1000 * 1024 is the same as 512..  4000 * 256 or 2000 * 512 works 
>> but starts erroring 600kpps (SMP right now but it happens in UP too)
>
> I have patched src/sys/kern/kern_poll.c to support higher burst_max 
> values:
> #define MAX_POLL_BURST_MAX      10000
>
> When setting kern.polling.burst_max to higher values, the server reach 
> a point, where cpu-usage goes up without load, so try to keep below 
> this values. I also have set the network card to 4096 rx-"ram", to 
> have more room for late polls.
>
> Kind regards,
>     Ingo Flaschberger
>
>