Hey Joe (where are you goin' with that OpenBSD CD in your hand?), ; ) On 10/10/2005, at 11:02 AM, Joe S wrote: > > After doing my own tests, I found that the Ultra 5 was too slow to > perform near wire-speed throughput. > > TEST 1 - Sun Ultra 5 360MHz > dc0 and dc1 are Phobos 430TX quad nic, PCI card > [ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 42.1 MBytes 35.3 Mbits/sec > > > TEST 2 - Supermicro, Intel P4 3GHz > em0 and em1 Intel PRO/1000CT (82547EI), onboard nics > [ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 96.1 MBytes 80.7 Mbits/sec
Your Ultra 5 iperf results were so far off my 333MHz Ultra 10 firewall, that I decided to do some testing with my 360MHz Ultra 5. I previously thought the 360MHz had 512kbyte of L2 cache, but it's actually 256kbyte in my U5 and it seems there is a 256k 360MHz (for the U5) and also a 2Mbyte 360MHz (for the U10). I thought that maybe that much more L2 would be much better for pf than a few extra MHz. The end point machines running iperf are FreeBSD 5.4 RELEASE. One is a 2.13GHz Pentium M Sony notebook with a GigE Realtek and the other is an AMD XP 2800+ desktop with an fxp. Nothing else changed except for the CPU module. Here are the results: Direct crossover connection: 94.1 Mbits/sec. 360MHz in the Ultra 5: pf OFF: 67.2 Mbits/sec pf ON: 47.3 Mbits/sec. 333MHz in the Ultra 5: pf OFF: 77.0 Mbits/sec pf ON: 74.0 Mbits/sec. Seems like that little 256k L2 in the 360 hurts pf performance badly. According to http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/U5/spec.html you can put a 333MHz or 400MHz CPU with 2Mbyte L2 in the Ultra 5. I've seen these on Ebay. I'm using a U10 for the extra PCI slot allowing me to have the 5 NICS I need for my current desired config. The U10 apparently can also go to 440MHz with 2Mbyte L2. I wonder if the U5 could take this anyway? I currently am only using 1 memory bank in my U10 and U5. I'd be curious to see if these numbers change using both banks interleaved. Shane J Pearson
