So, while the question includes the "stability" of how things get plumbed for a VM and whether moving some of that into the NIC emulation might help :) I've gone ahead and re-run the experiment with bare-iron. This time just for kicks I used 50 Mbit/s throttle inbound and outbound. The results can be seen in:

ftp://ftp.netperf.org/50_mbits.tgz

Since this is now bare-iron, inbound is ingress and outbound is egress. That is reversed from what it would be for a VM situation where VM outbound traverses the ingress filter and VM inbound traverses the egress qdisc.

Both systems were running Ubuntu 12.04.01 3.2.0-26 kernels, there was plenty of CPU horsepower (2x E5-2680s in this case) and the network between them was 10GbE using their 530FLB LOMs (BCM 57810S) connected via a ProCurve 6120 10GbE switch. That simply happened to be the most convenient bare-iron hardware I had on hand as one of the cobbler's children. There was no X running on the systems, the only thing of note running on them was netperf.

So, is the comparative instability between inbound and outbound fundamentally inherent in using ingress policing, or more a matter of "Silly Rick, you should be using <these settings> instead?"

If the former, is it then worthwhile to try to have NIC emulation only pull from the VM at the emulated rate, to keep the queues in the VM where it can react to them more directly? And are there any NIC emulations doing that already (as virtio does not seem to at present)?

happy benchmarking,

rick jones
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