Best example for showing throughput?

[Patrick Mahan <mahan-5dHXHCkEAVbYtjvyW6yDsg@public.gmane.org>]

Good morning,

I have been playing with this code now for about 2 weeks.  I posted
earlier about being unable to get it to work on Fedora 14, but have
it working on CentOS 6.4.  Here is my hardware -

Intel Xeon E5-2690 (8 physical, 16 virtual)
64 Gbyte DDR3 memory
Intel 82599EB-SPF dual port 10GE interface
CentOS 6.4 (2.6.32-358.6.1.el6.x86_64)

The 82599 is in a 16x PCI-e slot.

I have it attached to an IXIA box.  I have been running the app 'testpmd'
in iofwd mode with 2K rx/tx descriptors and 512 burst/mbcache.  I have been
varying the # of queues and unfortunately, I am not seeing full line rate.

I have CentOS booted to runlevel 3 (no X windows) and have turned off (I think)
all of the background processes I can.

I am seeing about 20-24% droppage on the receive side.  It doesn't seem to
matter the # of queues.

Question 1: Is 'testpmd' the best application for this type of testing?  If not,
            which program?  Or do I need to roll my own?

Question 2: I have blacklisted the Intel i350 ports on the motherboard and am
            using ssh to access the platform.  Could this be affecting the test?

Thoughts?


Thanks,

Patrick