Date: Mon, 03 May 1999 16:56:55 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: sthaug@nethelp.no Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Decent network cards for 100Mbit? Message-ID: <372E29B7.2102CC39@softweyr.com> References: <372DF8B2.667763F0@softweyr.com> <51248.925760235@verdi.nethelp.no>
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sthaug@nethelp.no wrote:
>
> > My only complaint about the EEPro 100B cards is paying Intel $65 for
> > a card that has a single $4 chip on it. Bleh. Plus, the performance
> > I've seen hasn't been all that stellar, but I may be doing something
> > wrong. I haven't really tried tuning the system much yet, just doing
> > some simple throughput tests using ftp and tcpblast.
>
> Performance from these cards should be very good. I was able to receive a
> full 100 Mbps with one of these cards in a P-133 running 3.0-970124-SNAP,
> ie. more than two years ago.
>
> To *send* a full 100 Mbps you need slightly more CPU, say a P-166.
I should probably point out I'm doing network throughput torture
tests with 64-byte packets. ;^) Any reasonably good Fast Ethernet
card on a respectable PCI machine will do 100 Mbps using 1500 byte
packets. Using FreeBSD-3.1 (somewhere between RELEASE and STABLE)
on a PII/233 (sender) and PPro 200 (receiver), I get the following
figures:
Driver Card Throughput
------ ------ -------------------------------------
xl 3c905 30.4 Mbps
xl 3c905B 32.0 Mbps
doesn't work unless there is a 3c905
in the system as well.
fxp EEPro 100B 32.7 Mbps
pn LNE100TX 39.6 Mbps
I haven't attempted to measure interrupt overhead or anything like
that since the only important measure for MY needs are "how fast
can this thing stuff bits onto the wire?" I think the pn device is
approaching the saturation point; the others do not come close.
I'll also be using these for testing multicast throughput later on,
with a lot of multicast groups. Since the PNIC chip supports "perfect
multicast filtering," I.e. it has hardware filters for all ethernet
multicast addresses, I am hoping these cards will perform well in this
environment as well.
Your mileage may vary. ;^)
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
http://www.softweyr.com/~softweyr wes@softweyr.com
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