AMD64 much slower than i386 on FreeBSD 5.4-pre

[jason henson]

em1897 at aol.com wrote:

> The answer, Boris, is that the "team" has no idea what
> they're doing. Check out some of the threads on
> performance testing. They tune little pieces here
> and there, and break 10 other things in the process.
> Matt Dillon "determined" that 10,000 ints/second
> was "optimal". Of course if you're passing 10Kpps
> that means you get an interrupt for every
> packet.
>
> They're playing pin the tail on the donkey.
>
You could understand what he was saying?  I wanted to help but was 
unsure of what he was asking.  I also seem to remember that discussion 
you are referring too.  IIRC, 10,000hz for pooling was the setting they 
ere talking about.  But on it would very a little, and with the fxp 
based card polling hurt a little because the card was already ding its 
own thing in hardware.  So that setting was redundant, it was best to 
leave it alone. 

He also seemed to say the network bandwidth was constant, and system 
load rose with an 64bit system.  This right?  If he was using GENERIC on 
a smp system he was only using 1 cpu with out a recompile.  There is 
just so much that could be wrong and he gives no information on his 
system or settings. 

Doess he have 2 amd64 pcs with 2 different installs of 5.3, or a single 
machine that he ran both versions on?  The router, is that a third 
machine that was an amd64 system, or something else?  He says i386, but 
an up to date 5.3 world doesn't support 386 with out a work around.  The 
least commom setting is now 486, but a build for 686 would be better.  
Did he tell you if he had polling on?

So I guess it is a good thing you were able to help him, because I 
couldn't.  Not to mention the flame bait you through out, well, that 
would be wrong.