From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jesse Brandeburg Subject: fedora 14 kernel performance with ip forwarding workload Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2011 11:51:06 -0700 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Cc: Jesse Brandeburg , NetDEV list To: fedora-kernel-list@redhat.com Return-path: Received: from mail-bw0-f46.google.com ([209.85.214.46]:50286 "EHLO mail-bw0-f46.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756518Ab1DFSvI (ORCPT ); Wed, 6 Apr 2011 14:51:08 -0400 Received: by bwz15 with SMTP id 15so1403366bwz.19 for ; Wed, 06 Apr 2011 11:51:06 -0700 (PDT) Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: The other day I was running the stock fedora kernel on my ip forwarding setup, to see what the performance was, and the performance wasn't very good. system is S5520HC dual socket 2.93GHz Xeon 5570 (Nehalem) with 3 quad port 82580 adapters (12 ports). Traffic is bidirectional 64 byte packets being forwarded and received on each port, basically port to port routing. I am only using 12 flows currently. The driver is igb, and I am using an affinity script that lines up each pair of ports that are forwarding traffic into optimal configurations for cache locality. I am also disabling remote_node_defrag_ratio to stop cross node traffic. With the fedora default kernel from F14 it appears that CONFIG_NETFILTER=y means that I cannot unload all of netfilter even if I stop iptables service. perf showed netfilter being prominent, and removing it gives me much higher throughput. Is there a reason CONFIG_NETFILTER=y ? Isn't it a good thing to be able to disable netfilter if you want to? Jesse