Hello!

We just got a nice file server with an Intel 82599EB 10GB Ethernet adapter,
and are trying various things for optimal performance.

That tcp-segmentation-offload is working really great, and I can see 64k
packets going in and 1518 byte packets coming out on the wire in amazing
speed, we can easily saturate the 1GBit the blade client is connected with
with 938 MBit/s.

Now, I thought, increasing the interface MTU to 9000 should boost performance
even more, but instead it reduced it to about 600MBit/s, apparently because the
tcp offloading is not working as before. The maximum frame size I see going
to the interface is 17962 Bytes, and also quite a few with 9018 bytes.

Any hint what might be the cause for that, or what I have missed?

One guess is that the asymmetrical setup here (sending on 10GBE, receiving
on 1GB) might cause it, but looking at the packet dumps it should work
like a charm, no lost packets, of course with "TCP Window full" all the time.
The receiver uses a Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708S 1GBit adapter,
is this one maybe known to have problems with large MTUs?
After all that "MTU 9000 considered harmful" statements, is there a more
useful large PDU? I also tried 8252, but it still achieves very bad
performance with the largest tcp segment beeing 16478 bytes.

Operating system is openSuse 12.1, "modinfo ixgbe" shows driver
version "3.4.8-k"

Ring buffers are available, as far as I can tell:
# ethtool -k eth4
Offload parameters for eth4:
rx-checksumming: on
tx-checksumming: on
scatter-gather: on
tcp-segmentation-offload: on
udp-fragmentation-offload: off
generic-segmentation-offload: on
generic-receive-offload: on
large-receive-offload: on
rx-vlan-offload: on
tx-vlan-offload: on
ntuple-filters: off
receive-hashing: on

# ethtool -g eth4
Ring parameters for eth4:
Pre-set maximums:
RX:             4096
RX Mini:        0
RX Jumbo:       0
TX:             4096
Current hardware settings:
RX:             512
RX Mini:        0
RX Jumbo:       0
TX:             512

Thanks for any help or pointers.

Regards,
Walter
-- 
Walter Zimmer

German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Earth Observation Center (EOC)
Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF)
Department Atmospheric Processors (AP)

Oberpfaffenhofen
82234 Wessling

Tel.: +49 (8153) 28 1492
Fax: +49 (8153) 28 1446
email: [email protected]
Internet: http://www.dlr.de/eoc

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