fxp performance with POLLING

[Andrei Kolu]

Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 09:02:33AM +0200, Bartosz Stec wrote:
>   
>> Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>>     
>>> * Bartosz Stec <admin at kkip.pl> [081003 07:23] wrote:
>>>   
>>>       
>>>> Hello again :)
>>>>
>>>> With POLLING enabled I experience about 10%-25% performance drop when 
>>>> copying files over network. Tested with both SAMBA and NFS. Is it 
>>>> normal?
>>>>
>>>>    FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE #0: Sat Sep  6 01:52:12 CEST 2008
>>>>    fxp0: <Intel 82801DB (ICH4) Pro/100 Ethernet> port 0xc800-0xc83f mem
>>>>    0xe1021000-0xe1021fff irq 20 at device 8.0 on pci1
>>>>
>>>>    # ifconfig fxp0
>>>>    fxp0: flags=9843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,LINK0,MULTICAST>
>>>>    metric 0 mtu 1500
>>>>            options=8<VLAN_MTU>
>>>>            ether 00:20:ed:42:87:13
>>>>            inet 192.168.0.2 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
>>>>            media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
>>>>            status: active
>>>>
>>>> BTW overall SAMBA performance still sucks on 7.1-pre as much as on  
>>>> RELENG_5 ...:( - 7.5 MB/s peak.
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> 7.5MB is 75% effeciency of a 100mbit card.  Not amazing, but
>>> not "sucks".
>>>
>>> Where do you see faster performance?
>>>
>>> Between windows machines on the same hardware or linux server?
>>>
>>>   
>>>       
>> It sucks because it is a peak performance. About 5-6 MB/s average. I  
>> tried polling only because I found some suggestions on mailing lists,  
>> that it could improve performance with SAMBA on FreeBSD. As you see at  
>> the top of this thread - not in my case :) I also tried sysctl tunings,  
>> and smb.conf settings, also suggested on maling lists, with no or very  
>> little improvements noticed. Most of suggestions unfortunately end with  
>> "change OS to Linux if you want to use SAMBA". I think I will try to  
>> change NIC to 1Gbit - hope that helps :) Or maybe there's some "FreeBSD  
>> and SAMBA tuning guide" which I didn't found?
>>     
>
> Can you please test network I/O using something like netperf or one of
> the other network-benchmark tools and not things like NFS or Samba
> which rely on disk I/O and other aspects?
>
>   
I remember when on FreeBSD 4.x I was able to copy files from samba and 
to samba up to 12MB/s on 100Mbit lan. Now with FreeBSD 6.x or 7.x I can 
have barely 8MB/s on 100Mbit and 27MB/s on Gigabit lan. Netperf shows 
900Mbit/s in any direction, small variety with different switches (ca 
10% difference).