FreeBSD 8.0 ixgbe Poor Performance

[Brandon Gooch]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 9:32 AM, Stephen Sanders
<ssanders at softhammer.net> wrote:
> I am running speed tests on a pair of systems equipped with Intel 10Gbps
> cards and am getting poor performance.
>
> iperf and tcpdump testing indicates that the card is running at roughly
> 2.5Gbps max transmit/receive.
>
> My attempts at turning fiddling with netisr, polling, and varying the
> buffer sizes has been fruitless.  I'm sure there is something that I'm
> missing so I'm hoping for suggestions.
>
> There are two systems that are connected head to head via  cross over
> cable.  The two systems have the same hardware configuration.  The
> hardware is as follows:
>
> 2 Intel E5430 (Quad core) @ 2.66 Ghz
> Intel S5000PAL Motherboard
> 16GB Memory
>
> My iperf command line for the client is:
>
> iperf -t 10 -c 169.0.0.1 -w 2.5M -l 2.5M
>
> My TCP dump test command lines are:
>
> tcpdump -i ix0 -w/dev/null
> tcpreplay -i ix0 -t -l 0 -K ./test.pcap

If you're running 8.0-RELEASE, you might try updating to 8-STABLE.
Jack Vogel recently committed updated Intel NIC driver code:

http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/stable/8/sys/dev/ixgbe/

-Brandon