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Date:      Fri, 25 Aug 2006 20:41:26 +1200
From:      Andrew Thompson <thompsa@freebsd.org>
To:        Ian FREISLICH <if@hetzner.co.za>
Cc:        freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: 802.1Q vlan performance.
Message-ID:  <20060825084126.GA80099@heff.fud.org.nz>
In-Reply-To: <E1GGWGA-000C6D-7d@hetzner.co.za>
References:  <E1GGWGA-000C6D-7d@hetzner.co.za>

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On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 09:37:46AM +0200, Ian FREISLICH wrote:
> Hi
> 
> While doing some experimentation and work on ipfw to see where I
> could improve performance for our virtualised firewall I came across
> the following comment in sys/net/if_vlan.c:
> 
>  * The VLAN_ARRAY substitutes the dynamic hash with a static array
>  * with 4096 entries. In theory this can give a boots(sic) in processing,
>  * however on practice it does not. Probably this is because array
>  * is too big to fit into CPU cache.
> 
> Can anyone suggest a good reason not to turn this option on by
> default.  It looks to me like it dramatically improves performance.

Its because of the amount of memory it uses, 16k doesnt sound like much
but its valuable kernel memory. It was discussed a bit here, 
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2005-October/008716.html


cheers,
Andrew



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