Routing performance HP-ML350

[Mihai Tanasescu]

Hello,


I've got a HP ML-350 machine, dual Xeon 3Ghz.

The system is running:

FreeBSD  6.1-RELEASE-p7

and has the following netcards and traffic:

2 x fxp cards
2 x em cards

each fxp card does about 80mbits traffic in/out

each em card does about 200 mbits traffic in/out (packets are routed 
from em0 to em1 --> cisco 3750 access layer equipment)

What I've noticed recently is that my CPU usage stays at about 80% when 
systat -ip 10 shows an average of  150-180 kpps being forwarded through 
this box.

With SMP enabled I had 85-90% CPU interrupt load so I disabled that.
Also I disabled the ipfw queueing code I had on one of the fxp cards 
(dynamic queueing with 6000 hash buckets - I have quite that many ip 
addresses and wanted each to hash to a different queue).
The load dropped to 60%.
Also I have polling disabled on the em cards (polling was causing packet 
drops with different Hz values; didn't try the idle poll as that used to 
crash my machine after a day or so of working a couple of months ago) 
and fast_forwarding enabled.
On the fxp cards I tried with both polling enabled/disabled.

I wanted to ask if there is any other tweaking possible to improve the 
routing performance.

Thanks,
Mihai