> This is some fairly ancient hardware, so what you can get out if it will > be limited. Though gige should not be impossible. >
Agreed!!! > The usual tricks are to make sure netfilter is not loaded, especially > the conntrack/nat based parts as that will inspect every flow for state > information. Either make sure those parts are compiled out or the > modules/code never loads. > > If you have any iptables/netfilter rules, make sure they are 1) > stateless 2) properly organized (cant just throw everything into FORWARD > and expect it to be performant). > We do use a statefull iptables on our router, some forward rules... This is known to be on of our issues, not sure if having a separate iptables box would be the best and only solution for this? > You could try setting IRQ affinity so both ports run on the same core, > however I'm not sure if that will help much as its still the same cache > and distance to memory. On modern NICS you can do tricks like tie rx of > port 1 with tx of port 2. Probably not on that generation though. Those figures include IRQ affinity tweaks at the kernel and APIC level. > > The 82571EB and 82573E is, while old, PCIe hardware, there should not be > any PCI bottlenecks, even with you having to bounce off that stone age > FSB that old CPU has. Not sure well that generation intel NIC silicon > does linerate easily though. > > But really you should get some newerish hardware with on-cpu PCIe and > memory controllers (and preferably QPI). That architectural jump really > upped the networking throughput of commodity hardware, probably by > orders of magnitude (people were doing 40Gbps routing using standard > Linux 5 years ago). Any ideas of the setup??? Maybe as far as naming some chipset, interface? And xserver that is the best candidate. Will google.. :) > Curious about vmstat output during saturation, and kernel version too. > IPv4 routing changed significantly recently and IPv6 routing performance > also improved somewhat. > > Will get that output during peak on monday for you guys. Newest kernel 3.6 or 7... Thank you so much for your insight, Nick.