Subject: Performance of Alteon/Tigon Gigabit Ethernet cards
To: None <tech-net@netbsd.org, port-alpha@netbsd.org>
From: Hal Murray <murray@pa.dec.com>
List: port-alpha
Date: 01/29/2001 22:49:49
I'm running my collection of network testing/bashing scritps. Performance
is "strange" but I can't put my finger on it yet.
I'm running 1.5 on Miatas (600au) and XP1000s.
Are there are any known problems/quirks? Or parameters I should
tweak? Anybody managed to get good results on this gear?
Any good/bad results with jumbo packets?
The symptoms are that sometimes things are reasonable and then, an
hour later when I run the same script again, it doesn't work very
well.
For example, a TCP request-response test with short data blocks takes
either 200 microseconds or 10 miliseconds. It works within reason
for blocks over 20K bytes - throughput is 230 megabits.
I'm guessing there is some internal mode/state that I'm getting into
that's "bad". Obviously, I don't know what it is yet.
One of my tests is a simple UDP-blast test that often overloads the
receive side. I see things like this in the /var/log/messages.
Jan 29 18:16:16 ruby /netbsd: WARNING: mclpool limit reached; increase NMBCLUSTERS
Jan 29 18:16:16 ruby /netbsd: ti0: cluster allocation failed -- packet dropped!
Jan 29 18:16:36 ruby last message repeated 867 times
Jan 29 18:16:36 ruby /netbsd: fpa0: can't alloc cluster
Jan 29 18:16:36 ruby /netbsd: ti0: cluster allocation failed -- packet dropped!
Jan 29 18:16:49 ruby last message repeated 800 times
Jan 29 18:17:09 ruby last message repeated 412 times
Jan 29 18:17:21 ruby /netbsd: WARNING: mclpool limit reached; increase NMBCLUSTERS
That could be poisioning things.
I guess I'll try some tests without that mode.
[Sorry for such a fuzzy question.]