Re: Bad network performance over 2Gbps

[Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 01:36:36AM +0300, Anton Titov wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-15 at 13:40 -0700, Kok, Auke wrote:
> > Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > 1) turn the in-kernel IRQBALANCE option off !
> Actually it may be already removed. I remember it being under "Processor
> type and features" and I currently cannot find it there for x86_64
> 
> > 2) use either the userspace `irqbalance` daemon or
> > 3) set smp_affinity manually
> 
> I tried echoing 3 (assuming that CPU0 and CPU1 will share their cache,
> as advised in other mails) into smp_affinity of all ethX interrupts and
> no positive result was observed.

But have you disabled irqbalance before doing this ? (you must reboot
and pass "noirqbalance" on the command line for this).

Also, if you are running on quad-core intel CPUs, I'm told that they're
simply two standard dual-core CPUs in the same case, so there is no
shared cache between any core. You should try to assign all irqs to
CPU0 for a test. It *must* make a difference, in either direction.

> I will try disabling NAPI and limiting e1000 interrupts tomorrow.

I found the parameter name I was speaking about : InterruptThrottleRate.
Beware it's an array with one entry per NIC, so you have to set as many
values as you have NICs. I have always observed huge performance boosts
when using the tunables the driver provides.

Willy