Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2012 18:45:54 +0100 From: Victor Balada Diaz <victor@bsdes.net> To: John Fretby <jfretby@googlemail.com> Cc: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD boxes as a 'router'... Message-ID: <20121120174554.GC50873@equilibrium.bsdes.net> In-Reply-To: <CAN9kdQnkaF3NdEsoBh2q%2Bxf73rur%2B1JSVGcUo8xfhugJMQ_oMw@mail.gmail.com> References: <CAN9kdQnkaF3NdEsoBh2q%2Bxf73rur%2B1JSVGcUo8xfhugJMQ_oMw@mail.gmail.com>
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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.
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