Re: In search of 10gbps cards/shootout in Linux?

[Bill Fink <billfink@mindspring.com>]

On Sat, 8 Sep 2007, Justin Piszcz wrote:

> There are various agencies/educational institutions doing testing but was 
> curious if anyone has 'found' a 10 gigabit card shootout measuring the 
> performance between 10 gigabit cards on the 2.6 kernel?  Most of the 
> benchmarks are from the vendors themselves Intel/etc-- was wondering if 
> there were any vendor-independent benchmarks out there?
> 
> Until switches come down in price, 10gbps will be most relegated to 
> business/research use and therefore such benchmarks probably will be hard 
> to come by but I thought I'd ask..

I haven't done any comparisons with other vendor offerings, but I can
highly recommend the Myricom PCI-Express (8x) 10-GigE NICs.  They only
cost about $900 and can do full unidirectional 10-GigE line rate.  And
as a 10-GigE router, they can do full bidirectional 10-GigE line rate
IP forwarding.  Note the choice of system/motherboard/CPU is as
important as the choice of NIC in achieving maximum performance.

Sample nuttcp test:

chance7 -> chance9 10-second TCP test:

[root@chance7 ~]# nuttcp -w10m 192.168.88.16
11817.8125 MB /  10.00 sec = 9909.8073 Mbps 100 %TX 71 %RX

The system specs are:

Tyan Thunder K8WE S2895ANRF motherboard with Nvidia nForce
Professional 2200+2050 chipset, 2 AMD Opteron 254 2.8 GHz CPUs,
4 GB PC3200 ECC REG-DDR 400 memory, and 2 PCI-Express x16 slots
(2 buses).  The systems are running a 2.6.20.7 kernel.

Perhaps others can share their experiences with 10-GigE NICs.

						-Bill