Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 15:54:17 +1030 From: "Wilkinson, Alex" <alex.wilkinson@DSTO.defence.gov.au> To: net@freebsd.org Subject: Re: polling(4) rocks! Message-ID: <20041118052417.GR66822@squash.dsto.defence.gov.au> In-Reply-To: <20041117181351.GA48071@comp.chem.msu.su> References: <20041117181351.GA48071@comp.chem.msu.su>
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Why can some NIC use polling and others not ? eg I went to turn on polling on my BCM5782 Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet Card. And bge(4) doesn't mention anything about polling. Is it a hardware feature of the NIC ? - aW 0n Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 09:13:51PM +0300, Yar Tikhiy wrote: Hi there, I can't but remind you that there's polling(4) in FreeBSD :-) Until today, I was convinced for some obscure reason that polling(4) was an experimental feature that might or might not work. Today I tried it on our central router box and got astounding results. The router box is a 1.4GHz Celeron PC with an fxp(4) interface split across a dozen of vlans. There is nothing special about its setup except for ~250 rules loaded into ipfw2. It is running 4.10-RELEASE. Without polling, it was able to switch full 10Mbytes/sec of traffic (~9kpps), but that took from 50 to 70% CPU time spent in interrupts. With polling on, interrupt time never exceeds 5% and it stays as low as 1-2% on average even when traffic is that high. Many thanks to folks who have had a hand in polling(4) development! Just in case: Please be aware that polling(4) won't make KDE run faster unless on a busy router ;-) -- Yar _______________________________________________ freebsd-net@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-net To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-net-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
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