From owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Nov 20 17:46:03 2012 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BA533B2B for ; Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:46:03 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from victor@bsdes.net) Received: from equilibrium.bsdes.net (244.Red-217-126-240.staticIP.rima-tde.net [217.126.240.244]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 581158FC12 for ; Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:46:02 +0000 (UTC) Received: by equilibrium.bsdes.net (Postfix, from userid 1001) id ED15539832; Tue, 20 Nov 2012 18:45:54 +0100 (CET) Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2012 18:45:54 +0100 From: Victor Balada Diaz To: John Fretby Subject: Re: FreeBSD boxes as a 'router'... Message-ID: <20121120174554.GC50873@equilibrium.bsdes.net> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Cc: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org X-BeenThere: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Internet Services Providers List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:46:03 -0000 On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 03:35:13PM +0000, John Fretby wrote: > Howdy all, > > We've currently got an ageing HP DL360 running as a 'router' - it has > 100Mbit in/out onto our network, and has two 'bce' NIC's providing in/out. > It's running quite an old version of FreeBSD (6 I think) - but works. > > As the network gets busier we've noticed the amount of interrupt time on it > is climbing (as you'd expect - i.e. esp. if many small packets are being > forwarded). Many moons ago we did experiment with this box - and enabled > device polling (inc. upping the HZ on the box and recompiling the kernel > etc). This didn't work very well at the time (probably because it was in > it's infancy) so we left it off in the end. > > If we were to replace this box, with something new - say a SuperMicro based > system with two: > > Intel 82574L's (em Driver Based) > > And enable polling - is it likely to "just work" these days? The current > upstream is 100Mbit, we're looking to upgrade this to 1Gbit in, but with > say 200Mbit comitted on it (so shouldn't go above 200Mbit). > > Is there anything that has to be done to enable polling - other than > recompiling GENERIC to support it? - i.e. no HZ hacks or anything needed on > 'modern' machines (it's a quad core Xeon). Hello John, You might find interesting to read this thread: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2012-November/037590.html In short: device polling can decrease performance on modern hardware. You might want to try upgrading to a new FreeBSD version and tuning it somehow before buying a new server. More info on tuning the network stack: http://wiki.freebsd.org/NetworkPerformanceTuning Regards. Victor. -- La prueba más fehaciente de que existe vida inteligente en otros planetas, es que no han intentado contactar con nosotros.