From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon May 3 15:57:47 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from xylan.com (postal.xylan.com [208.8.0.248]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7775814D8E for ; Mon, 3 May 1999 15:57:39 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from mailhub.xylan.com by xylan.com (8.8.7/SMI-SVR4 (xylan-mgw 2.2 [OUT])) id PAA23141; Mon, 3 May 1999 15:57:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: from omni.xylan.com by mailhub.xylan.com (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4 (mailhub 2.1 [HUB])) id PAA17448; Mon, 3 May 1999 15:57:09 -0700 Received: from softweyr.com (dyn3.utah.xylan.com) by omni.xylan.com (4.1/SMI-4.1 (xylan engr [SPOOL])) id AA08283; Mon, 3 May 99 15:57:04 PDT Message-Id: <372E29B7.2102CC39@softweyr.com> Date: Mon, 03 May 1999 16:56:55 -0600 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr LLC X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 3.1-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: en Mime-Version: 1.0 To: sthaug@nethelp.no Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Decent network cards for 100Mbit? References: <372DF8B2.667763F0@softweyr.com> <51248.925760235@verdi.nethelp.no> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message