Matthew R. Dempsky wrote:
I have three machines that I'm using for testing network performance:
- 2.0GHz Pentium 4, 256MiB RAM, Ubuntu 6.06, e1000
- 266MHz Pentium II, 192MiB RAM, Debian Unstable, sk98lin
- 600MHz Pentium M, 256MiB RAM, OpenBSD 4.0-current, em(4)
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> [cut]
Can anyone explain the huge discrepancy here? Can I do anything to get
OpenBSD to achieve at least 150 Mbits/sec?
Thanks.
Besides certain compex cards (wb driver, 3.8, with queuing under PF),
I haven't had any strange problems with bandwidth either (testing plenty
of fxp, xl, rl, vr cards). Well, there were some, but that's different
subject regarding cbq/hfsc and non-borrowing queues, at certain speeds.
You can try few other methods to measure bandwidth. For example:
- 2 nc, one reading from /dev/zero, the other writing to /dev/null
- out of box openbsd's httpd, wget writing to /dev/null
- some ftp transfer or even scp from dd's premade file (disk shouldn't
really be a bottleneck at fast ethernet speeds, neither should be encryption
with not hopelessy old cpu)
Pair these with some simple PF setting using queues, and watch the bandwidth
with pftop, systat, ifstat or pfctl -vvsq to name a few. Time command can be
helpful too.
Also, remember that queuing works only in outgoing direction, if you decide
to use it.
