fxp performance with POLLING

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 09:02:33AM +0200, Bartosz Stec wrote:
> Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>> * Bartosz Stec <admin at kkip.pl> [081003 07:23] wrote:
>>   
>>> Hello again :)
>>>
>>> With POLLING enabled I experience about 10%-25% performance drop when 
>>> copying files over network. Tested with both SAMBA and NFS. Is it 
>>> normal?
>>>
>>>    FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE #0: Sat Sep  6 01:52:12 CEST 2008
>>>    fxp0: <Intel 82801DB (ICH4) Pro/100 Ethernet> port 0xc800-0xc83f mem
>>>    0xe1021000-0xe1021fff irq 20 at device 8.0 on pci1
>>>
>>>    # ifconfig fxp0
>>>    fxp0: flags=9843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,LINK0,MULTICAST>
>>>    metric 0 mtu 1500
>>>            options=8<VLAN_MTU>
>>>            ether 00:20:ed:42:87:13
>>>            inet 192.168.0.2 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
>>>            media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
>>>            status: active
>>>
>>> BTW overall SAMBA performance still sucks on 7.1-pre as much as on  
>>> RELENG_5 ...:( - 7.5 MB/s peak.
>>>     
>>
>> 7.5MB is 75% effeciency of a 100mbit card.  Not amazing, but
>> not "sucks".
>>
>> Where do you see faster performance?
>>
>> Between windows machines on the same hardware or linux server?
>>
>>   
> It sucks because it is a peak performance. About 5-6 MB/s average. I  
> tried polling only because I found some suggestions on mailing lists,  
> that it could improve performance with SAMBA on FreeBSD. As you see at  
> the top of this thread - not in my case :) I also tried sysctl tunings,  
> and smb.conf settings, also suggested on maling lists, with no or very  
> little improvements noticed. Most of suggestions unfortunately end with  
> "change OS to Linux if you want to use SAMBA". I think I will try to  
> change NIC to 1Gbit - hope that helps :) Or maybe there's some "FreeBSD  
> and SAMBA tuning guide" which I didn't found?

Can you please test network I/O using something like netperf or one of
the other network-benchmark tools and not things like NFS or Samba
which rely on disk I/O and other aspects?

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |