Hello, I just had the opportunity to test some Fluke network equipment, notably one which is able to throughput test gigabit networks.
I installed a Nexcom NSA1086 with OpenBSD 4.1-stable and did some tests. The NSA1086 units are equipped with a Pentium IV 3.2Ghz (hyperthreading disabled), and 1Gb ram. They have 4 sk gigabit interfaces, and 4 msk gigabit interfaces. Here are the tests: ********** ifconfig sk0 up ifconfig sk1 up ifconfig bridge0 create ifconfig bridge0 up brconfig bridge0 add sk0 brconfig bridge0 add sk1 sysctl kern.maxclusters=256000 Then I connected the fluke analyzers to both sk ports. connections were correctly seen at 1000 base T full Duplex. then I started a throughput test on 1Gbps, and I was extremely surprised to see how performance was very poor. The throughput was only about 77Mbps. *************** Seeing that I decided to try on msk interfaces and got about the same "performance". *************** Then I configured routing between two interfaces. ifconfig sk2 inet 192.168.0.1 255.255.255.0 ifconfig sk3 inet 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0 sysctl net.inet.ip.forwarding=1 sysctl kern.maxclusters=256000 I did the throughput test, and got about 500Mbps both on sk and msk, with the CPU keeping quiet. ************** So the weak performance doesn't seem related to the bus, the CPU, or the sk/msk drivers. Has someone an explanation on why I get this kind of behavior?
