DELL PowerEdge 860 and Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet poor performance.

[Jean-Claude MICHOT]

On Wed, Dec 26, 2007 at 02:24:44PM -0500, Sten Daniel Soersdal said:
> Jean-Claude MICHOT wrote:
> >The server is a DELL PowerEdge 860 freshly installed with
> >FreeBSD 7.0-BETA4 (GENERIC Kernel).
> >
> >There's no problem with input throughput (upto 980 Mbits) but output 
> >throughput never go upper to 540 Mbits :(
> >
> >Just for test, i have add to this server an Intel Gigabit Ethernet board 
> >(em) and there's no problem to output data up to around 980 Mbits with
> >this addon board.
> >
> >If i boot the server with Linux Ubuntu, there's no output throughput 
> >problem with Broadcom, so it seem to be FreeBSD bge driver problem.
> >
> >I'm not the only one to have poor output performance with bge on        
> >DELL PowerEdge 860
> >http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2007-June/014373.html
> >
> >I have also try various patch or setup driver default values
> >http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2007-November/015951.html
> >http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2007-November/015956.html
> >
> >But all theses attempts to get better ouput performance was unsuccessful :(
> >
> >Any idea are welcome.
> >
> >PS: If it's usefull to debug and try to fix the problem, i can provide 
> >    root access to a DELL PE860 test server with bge.
> 
> Have you tried setting the tcp send and receive windows?
> The defaults are:
> 
> net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 32768
> net.inet.tcp.recvspace: 65536
> 
> Also you might want to try to lower:
> 
> net.inet.tcp.delacktime: 100

Yes, no difference. But as i said, same freebsd "config" with Intel em
board instead of Broadcom bge, and there's no output throuhgput problem.

JC

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