FreeBSD 8.0 ixgbe Poor Performance

[Stephen Sanders]

I am running speed tests on a pair of systems equipped with Intel 10Gbps
cards and am getting poor performance.

iperf and tcpdump testing indicates that the card is running at roughly
2.5Gbps max transmit/receive.

My attempts at turning fiddling with netisr, polling, and varying the
buffer sizes has been fruitless.  I'm sure there is something that I'm
missing so I'm hoping for suggestions.

There are two systems that are connected head to head via  cross over
cable.  The two systems have the same hardware configuration.  The
hardware is as follows:

2 Intel E5430 (Quad core) @ 2.66 Ghz
Intel S5000PAL Motherboard
16GB Memory

My iperf command line for the client is:

iperf -t 10 -c 169.0.0.1 -w 2.5M -l 2.5M

My TCP dump test command lines are:

tcpdump -i ix0 -w/dev/null
tcpreplay -i ix0 -t -l 0 -K ./test.pcap


Thanks