DNS Performance Numbers

[Marcelo Gardini do Amaral]

> FYI: In response to feedback from ISC, there are UDP transmit optimizations 
> in FreeBSD 7.x.  These have a relatively minor performance impact for 
> single-threaded applications, but in the special case of BIND accessing a 
> single UDP socket from many different threads, it significantly improves 
> performance.  I'll look at MFC'ing these to 6.x after 6.2-RELEASE 
> (especially if reminded in a month or so :-).
> 
> With regard to the possible bge issue -- I would encourage you to test 
> using a 7.x kernel, ideally with all the debugging disabled, and see if 
> there's been any improvement (or regression).  There has been a lot of 
> change in these areas, and it would be helpful to know what, if any, impact 
> this has had.


I made some tests using 7.x with all the debugging disabled:

                                queries / s

Int     bind (d_t)      bind (e_t)      nsd (1_s)       nsd (2_s)
---     ----------      ----------      ---------       ---------

bge     15439           14733           12910           10946
em      37655           34092           42411           41974


d_t: disable threads
e_t: enable threads (libpthread)
1_s: 1 server forked
2_s: 2 server forked

Bind: 9.2.3
NSD: 3.0.2
em: Dell 1950, Intel NIC, SMP kernel
bge: HP Blade BL35p, Broadcom NIC, SMP kernel
Client: Dell 1750, Intel NIC, FreeBSD 4.11 UP, running queryperf



The results are very good for em NIC, better than my numbers [1] with
FreeBSD 6.1 some months ago. So I guess that we had an improvement :-)

But I got the same poor performance with the bge interface. The
problem remains.

[1] http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2006-September/011767.html

Cheers,
Marcelo

-- 
Att.,

Marcelo Gardini
NIC .br