-----Original Message-----
From: Danial Thom [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 11:14 AM
To: Ted Mittelstaedt; Drew Tomlinson
Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: RE: Polling For 100 mbps Connections? (Was Re: Freebsd Theme
Song)
Well, if polling does no good for fxp, due to
the
hardware doing controlled interrupts, then why
does
the fxp driver even let you set it as an
option?
And why have many people who have enabled it on
fxp seen an improvement?
They haven't, freebsd accounting doesn't work
properly with polling enabled, and "they" don't
have the ability to "know" if they are getting
better performance, because "they", like you,
have no clue what they're doing. How about all
the idiots running MP with FreeBSD 4.x, when we
know its just a waste of time? "they" all think
they're getting worthwhile performance, because
"they" are clueless.
I would call them idiots if they are running MP under
FreeBSD and assuming that they are getting better
performance without actually testing for it. But
if they are just running MP because they happen to be
using an MP server, and they want to see if it will
work or not, who cares?
Maybe its tunable because they guy who wrote the
driver made it a tunable? duh. I've yet to see
one credible, controlled test that shows polling
vs properly tuned interrupt-driven.
Hm, OK I believe that. As I recall I asked you earlier to
post the test setup you used for your own tests
"proving" that polling is worse, and you haven't
done so yet. Now you are saying you have never seen
a credible controlled test that shows polling vs
interrupt-driven. So I guess either you were blind
when you ran your own tests, or your own tests
are not credible, controlled polling vs properly
tuned interrupt-driven. As I have been saying
all along. Now your agreeing with me.
The only advantage of polling is that it will
drop packets instead of going into livelock. The
disadvantage is that it will drop packets when
you have momentary bursts that would harmlessly
put the machine into livelock. Thats about it.
Ah, now I think suddenly I see what the chip on your
shoulder is. You would rather have your router based
on FreeBSD go into livelock while packets stack up,
than drop anything. You tested the polling code and found
that yipes, it drops packets.
What may I ask do you think that a Cisco or other
router does when you shove 10Mbt of traffic into it's
Ethernet interface destined for a host behind a T1 that
is plugged into the other end? (and no, source-quench
is not the correct answer)
I think the scenario of it being better to momentary go into
livelock during an overload is only applicable to one scenario,
where the 2 interfaces in the router are the same capacity.
As in ethernet-to-ethernet routers. Most certainly not
Ethernet-to-serial routers, like what most routers are
that aren't on DSL lines.
If you have a different understanding then please explain.
I've read those datasheets as well and the
thing I
don't understand is that if you are pumping
100Mbt
into an Etherexpress Pro/100 then if the card
will
not interrupt more than this throttled rate you
keep
talking about, then the card's interrupt
throttling
is going to limit the inbound bandwidth to
below
100Mbt.
Wrong again, Ted. It scares me that you consider
yourself knowlegable about this. You can process
# interrupts X ring_size packets; not one per
interrupt. You're only polling 1000x per second
(or whatever you have hz set to), so why do you
think that you have to interrupt for every packet
to do 100Mb/s?
I never said anything about interrupting for every
packet, did I? Of course not since I know what
your talking about. However, it is you who are throwing
around the numbers - or were in your prior post -
regarding the fxp driver and hardware. Why should
I have to do the work digging around in the datasheets
and doing the math?
Since you seem to be wanting to argue this from a
theory standpoint, then your only option is to do the
math. Go ahead, look up the datasheet for the 82557.
I'm sure it's online somewhere, and tell us what it says
about throttled interrupts, and run your numbers.
Do you not understand that packet
processing is the same whether its done on a
clock tick or a hardware interrupt? Do you not
understand that a clock tick has more overhead
(because of other assigned tasks)? Do you not
understand that getting exactly 5000 hardware
interrupts is much more efficient than having
5000 clock tick interrupts per second? What part
of this don't you understand?
Well, one part I don't understand is why when
one of those 5000 clock ticks happens and the fxp driver
finds no packets to take off the card, that it takes
the same amount of time for the driver to process
as when the fxp driver finds packets to process.
At least, that seems to be what your arguing.
As I've stated before once, probably twice, polling
is obviously less efficient at lower bandwidth. In interrupt
driven mode, to get 5000 interrupts per second you are most
likely going to be having a lot of traffic coming in,
whereas you could get no traffic at all with polling mode
in 5000 clock ticks. So clearly, the comparison is always
stacked towards polling being only a competitor at high bandwidth.
Why you insist on using scenarios as examples that are low
bandwidth scenarios I cannot understand because nobody
in this debate so far has claimed that polling is better
at low bandwidth.
I am as suspicious of testimonials as the next guy and
it is quite true that so far everyone promoting polling
in this thread has posted no test suites that are any better
than yours - you basically are blowing air at each other.
But there are a lot of others on the Internet that seem to
think it works great. I gave you some openings to
discredit them and you haven't taken them.
I myself have never tried polling, so I
am certainly not going to argue against a logical, reasoned
explanation of why it's no good at high bandwidth. So
far, however, you have not posted anything like this. And
I am still waiting for the test suites you have used for
your claim that the networking in 5.4 and later is worse,
and I don't see why you want to diverge into this side issue
on polling when the real issue is the alleged worse networking
in the newer FreeBSD versions.
Ted
