Hi Luca,

thank you for your fast reply! I thought using ZC might improve the transfer of 
the data to the processes. Of cause I wondered why I need to run a 
balancer-process, but I thought there might be more magic behind the scenes and 
the balancer-process is just a frontend.

Unfortunately the Intel cards are limited to 16 RSS queues. Do you think there 
is any possibility to further improve the PF_RING/ixgbe-driver setup?

Best regards,
Jan

________________________________
From: [email protected] 
[[email protected]] on behalf of Luca Deri [[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2015 12:03
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Ntop-misc] Using PF_RING ZC with Bro

Hi Jan,
we have been notified that the latest Bro version sixes some memory leaks that 
might cause the crash you have experienced.


On 21 Aug 2015, at 11:36, Jan Grashofer 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

Hi all,

I was trying to use PF_RING ZC with Bro, to improve performance. Unfortunately 
I was not able to get any benefit from using ZC.

My test system uses:
2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz (16 cores + 16 HT in sum)
64 GB RAM
82599ES 10-Gigabit SFI/SFP+ NIC (ixgbe-zc driver) seeing 6 GBit/s on average
Linux (2.6.32-504.23.4.el6.x86_64)
PFRING_ZC v.6.1.1.150527 (enable_tx_capture=0 min_num_slots=32768)

My reference setup is the following:
16 workers (pinned to cpus), 1 proxy
16 RSS queues with interrupts pinned, NUMA affinity set to first socket (next 
to the NIC)
Capture-loss average: 0.000262957682292
Capture-loss maximum: 0.022336
This are of course good stats.

My first try with ZC:
16 workers (pinned to cpus), 1 proxy
16 RSS queues, NUMA affinity set to first socket
hugepages enabled
zbalance_ipc -n 16 -m 1 -g 1
Capture-loss average: 0.289625722005
Capture-loss maximum: 9.155165
Obviously this was no improvement, but I read that using RSS together with ZC 
is counterproductive so I tried another setup.

My second try with ZC:
14 workers (pinned to cpus, first of each socket free), 1 proxy
32 RX/TX queues (default setting), NUMA affinity set to first socket
hugepages enabled
zbalance_ipc -n 16 -m 1 -g 0
Capture-loss average: 1.78585592428
Capture-loss maximum: 35.112188
Finally this got even worse (one factor may of cause be the reduced number of 
workers, but still no ZC improvement).

Additionally to the bad stats, Bro segfaults from time to time, when I am using 
ZC. As capture-loss correlates with packet drops, I think I may missed some 
essential thing in my setup. Do you have any suggestions?


If you can use RSS you do not need the balancer that uses memory bandwidth and 
does not add benefits, In fact with so many apps running you put quite some 
pressure on the memory subsystem that can cause the drawback,

>From our experience Bro is a great tool, but uses quite some resources. if you 
>need speed you should probably consider other options such as Suricata.

Regards Luca



Thanks,
Jan
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