Seeking performance tuning pointers/tracking down GIANT

[Chuck Swiger]

Lucky Green wrote:
> System:
> Dual processor Intel PentiumPro motherboard. FreeBSD 5.3 SMP kernel. fxp
> 100baseT NIC.
> 
> I am managing a system that is running tor, a fairly network intensive
> service. See http://tor.eff.org
> The service processes about 7Mbps symmetric traffic sustained. "top" shows
> about 33% CPU idle. There is plenty of inactive/free RAM. While server
> throughput grew steadily over time, throughput appears to have hit a ceiling
> at between 7 and 8 Mbps.

You can't do more than around 8-10 megabytes per second of actual data via a 
100 Mbs link due to network protocol overhead, packet collisions, and such. 
If you want this thing to go significantly faster, consider gigabit ethernet.

[ If you're only getting 8 megabits per second, then that's another case... ]

-- 
-Chuck