network performance 6.1 stable vs 4.9

Oliver Fromme olli at lurza.secnetix.de
Fri May 25 17:01:23 UTC 2007


Stephen Clark wrote:
 > The appliance is basically a firewall/nat/vpn device. We started on 6.1 
 > last year and it has
 > taken us a while to get things tested, plus I don't like to use a brand 
 > new release. If we go to
 > a later release it means we have to do complete regression testing, etc.
 > 
 > We are basically using a GENERIC config for our kernel. We, meaning the 
 > R&D team don't see any
 > performance issues in a controlled environment - 6.1 performs just as 
 > well as 4.9.
 > 
 > In subjective tests R&D has done using the following setup we see "no" 
 > problem:
 > 
 > freebsd+firefox <--100mbs lan---> 6.1 network appliance <----T1 
 > link----> internet
 > freebsd+firefox <--100mbs lan---> 4.9 network appliance <----T1 
 > link----> internet
 > 
 > One of our testers has the same setup but is using winblows/ie in place of
 > freebsd+firefox and subjectively says the 6.1 system is slower than the 
 > 4.9 system.

I think I remember there were some problems with TCP
window scaling earlier along the FreeBSD 6 branch, but
I'm not sure exactly when that was.  Maybe 6.1 is
affected.  The problem was that Windows uses an algorithm
that interfered badly with FreeBSD's.  While connections
between FreeBSD machines didn't show any issues, the
performance was suboptimal between FreeBSD and Windows.

Therefore I recommend you update to 6.2-RELEASE or, even
better, to RELENG_6 (6-stable).

Best regards
   Oliver

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