Richard,

Critical missing is the setup information. What is the server, CPU etc. Can you 
please provide?

Gilad


From: ewg-boun...@lists.openfabrics.org 
[mailto:ewg-boun...@lists.openfabrics.org] On Behalf Of richard Croucher
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2012 8:50 AM
To: ewg@lists.openfabrics.org
Subject: [ewg] dissappointing IPoIB performance

I've been undertaking some internal QA testing of the Mellanox CX3's.

An observation that I've seen for some time and is most likely to do with the 
IPoIB implementation rather than the HCA is that the latency of IPoIB is 
getting increasingly poor in comparison with the standard kernel TCP/IP stack 
over 10g Ethernet.

If we look at the results for the CX3's running both 10G Ethernet and 40G 
InfiniBand, on same serve hardware,  I get the following median latency with my 
test setup.  Results are with my own test program so are only meaningful as a 
comparison with the other configurations running the same test.

Running OFED 1.5.3 and RH 6.0

IPoIB (connected)   TCP 33.67 uS    (switchless)
IPoIB (datagram)    TCP 31.63 uS    (switchless)
IPoIB (connected)  UDP 24.78 uS    (switchless)
IPoIB (datagram)  UDP 24.28 uS     (switchless)
IPoIB (connected)  UDP 25.37 uS    (1 hop) between ports on same switch
IPoIB (connected)  TCP 34.48 uS     (1 hop)
10G Ethernet      UDP 24.04uS     (2 hops) across a LAG connected pair of 
Ethernet switches
10G Ethernet      TCP  34.59 uS    (2 hops)

The Mellanox Ethernet drivers are tuned for low latency rather than throughput, 
but I would have hoped that given the 4x extra bandwidth available it would 
have helped the InfiniBand drivers outperform.

I've seen similar results for CX2 .    10G ethernet is increasingly looking 
like the better option for low latency, particularly with the current 
generation of low latency Ethernet switches.  Switchless Ethernet has been 
better for some time than switchless InfiniBand, but it now looks to be the 
case in switched environments as well.  I think this reflects that there has 
been a lot of effort tweaking and tuning TCP/IP over Ethernet and its low level 
drivers, with very little activity on the IPoIB front.  Unless we see 
improvements here it will get increasingly difficult to justify InfiniBand 
deployments.


--

Richard Croucher
www.informatix-sol.com<http://www.informatix-sol.com>
+44-7802-213901


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