FreeBSD boxes as a 'router'...

[khatfield at socllc.net]

One thing I have noticed is mixed results with polling depending on the version.

My experience with similar NICs was that polling increased the PPS capabilities up to 7.4 but post 7.4 we have seen most cases where polling caused either connectivity issues or decreased overall performance.

Now we were running full 1Gbps in our tests. With only 140Mbps you should be able to handle this amount without polling or additional kernel tweaks. Specifically with 9 - I would recommend doing needed sysctl tweaks without polling and as long as you are not receiving DDoS traffic then it should prove perfectly stable.



On Nov 20, 2012, at 11:46 AM, "Victor Balada Diaz" <victor at bsdes.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 03:35:13PM +0000, John Fretby wrote:
>> Howdy all,
>> 
>> We've currently got an ageing HP DL360 running as a 'router' - it has
>> 100Mbit in/out onto our network, and has two 'bce' NIC's providing in/out.
>> It's running quite an old version of FreeBSD (6 I think) - but works.
>> 
>> As the network gets busier we've noticed the amount of interrupt time on it
>> is climbing (as you'd expect - i.e. esp. if many small packets are being
>> forwarded). Many moons ago we did experiment with this box - and enabled
>> device polling (inc. upping the HZ on the box and recompiling the kernel
>> etc). This didn't work very well at the time (probably because it was in
>> it's infancy) so we left it off in the end.
>> 
>> If we were to replace this box, with something new - say a SuperMicro based
>> system with two:
>> 
>>   Intel 82574L's (em Driver Based)
>> 
>> And enable polling - is it likely to "just work" these days? The current
>> upstream is 100Mbit, we're looking to upgrade this to 1Gbit in, but with
>> say 200Mbit comitted on it (so shouldn't go above 200Mbit).
>> 
>> Is there anything that has to be done to enable polling - other than
>> recompiling GENERIC to support it? - i.e. no HZ hacks or anything needed on
>> 'modern' machines (it's a quad core Xeon).
> 
> Hello John,
> 
> You might find interesting to read this thread:
> 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2012-November/037590.html
> 
> In short: device polling can decrease performance on modern hardware.
> 
> You might want to try upgrading to a new FreeBSD version and tuning it somehow
> before buying a new server. More info on tuning the network stack:
> 
> http://wiki.freebsd.org/NetworkPerformanceTuning
> 
> Regards.
> Victor.
> -- 
> La prueba más fehaciente de que existe vida inteligente en otros
> planetas, es que no han intentado contactar con nosotros. 
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