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Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:28:10 +0100
From: Phil Regnauld <regnauld@catpipe.net>
To: Marcos Bedinelli <bedinelli@madhaus.cns.utoronto.ca>
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Cc: freebsd-net@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Network performance in a dual CPU system
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Marcos Bedinelli (bedinelli) writes:
> I should've mentioned before that we are trying to save some money 
> here, therefore the idea is to add a second 2.4GHz Intel Xeon CPU to 
> our current box.
> 
> However, if there is consensus that a second processor will buy us 
> nothing, we'll need to acquire a new system and will consider your 
> suggestion.

	The problem is a combination of how your system is configured,
	and what you network load is.  If you have very high traffic,
	then it might help to have different netcards on different
	PCI busses to start with.  Also, run with polling mode, that might
	help.

	With regards to using a second CPU, it _should_ help with 6.0, but
	that really depends on the workload.  AMD processors (hypertransport
	in fact) can make a big different because of memory bandwidth if you
	are doing a lot of copying between buffers.