Poor network performance for clients in 100MB to Gigabit environment

Jack Vogel jfvogel at gmail.com
Tue Jul 1 20:25:27 UTC 2008


Take it from someone who has spent a couple weeks beating his
head against a wall over this... system tuning is essential.

If your driver is going to the kernel looking for a resource and
having to wait, its gonna hurt...

Look into kern.ipc, and as Paul said net.inet.

Off the shelf config is more than likely going to be inadequate.

Good luck,

Jack


On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 12:50 PM, David Kwan <david.kwan at isilon.com> wrote:
> I have a couple of questions regarding the TCP Stack:
>
>
>
> I have a situation with clients on a 100MB network connecting to servers
> on a Gigabit network where the client read speeds are very slow from the
> FreeBSD server and fast from the Linux server; Write speeds from the
> clients to both servers are fast.  (Clients on the gigabit network work
> fine with blazing read and write speeds).  The network traces shows
> congestion packets for both servers when doing reads from the clients
> (dup acks and retransmissions), but the Linux server seem to handle the
> congestion better. ECN is not enabled on the network and I don't see any
> congestion windowing or clients window changing.  The 100MB/1G switch
>
> is dropping packets.   I double checked the network configuration and
> also swapped swithports for the servers to use the others to make sure
> the switch configuration are the same, and the Linux always does better
> than FreeBSD.  Assuming that the network configuration is a constant for
> all clients and servers (speed, duplex, and etc...), the only variable
> is the servers themselves (Linux and FreeBSD).  I have tried a couple of
> FreeBSD machines with 6.1 and 7.0 and they exhibit the same problem,
> with no luck matching the speed and network utilization of Linux (2
> years old).  The read speed test I'm referring is doing transferring of
> a 100MB file (cifs, nfs, and ftp), and the Linux server does it
> consistently in around 10 sec (line speed) with a constant network
> utilization chart, while the FreeBSD servers are magnitudes slower with
> erratic network utilization chart.  I've attempted to tweak some network
> sysctl  options on the FreeBSD, and the only ones that helped were
> disabling TSO and inflight; which leads me to think that the
> inter-packet gap was slightly increased to partially relieve congestion
> on the switch; not a long term solution.
>
>
>
> My questions are:
>
>  1. Have you heard of this problem before with 100MB clients to Gigabit
> servers?
>
>  2. Are you aware of any Linux fix/patch in the TCP stack to better
> handling congestion than FreeBSD?  I'm looking to address this issue in
> the FreeBSD, but wondering if the Linux stack did something special that
> can help with the FreeBSD performance.
>
>
>
> David K.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-net at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-net
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-net-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>


More information about the freebsd-net mailing list