Re: Achieved 10Gbit/s bidirectional routing

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From: Willy Tarreau
Date: Friday, July 17, 2009 - 1:35 pm

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 11:38:27AM -0400, Bill Fink wrote:

Hey guys, those are really nice numbers. Since TCP splicing appeared in the
kernel (once we got it fixed), I achieved 10 Gbps of HTTP proxying using
haproxy with very low CPU usage (about 20% of a Core2Duo 2.66 GHz).

Before buying the machines, I had been wandering around with the NICs
donated by Myricom in order to try to find a machine capable of supporting
this. My conclusion was that a lot of machines had difficulties getting
above 3.5, 4.7 and 6.5 Gbps of output traffic (those 3 numbers were always
the same, depending on the chipsets). There clearly was a bandwidth
limitation imposed by the chipset.

So I waited for the X38 and AM780FX chipsets to become available and
bought 3 machines (1 C2D, 1 AMD X2, 1 AMD X4). Those ones have no problem
with 10 Gbps of forwarded traffic (20 Gbps of total bus bandwidth), even
with 1500 bytes frames, but I don't know how high they can go, maybe
they will saturate slightly above.

Unfortunately, I only have 5 NICs in 3 machines and no switch (and CX4
is hard to find these days), so I'm probably stuck at 10 Gbps max.

Interestingly, I had the impression that forwarding data with TCP
splicing costs less CPU than IP forwarding, because the NICs can do
LRO.

Also, I know a french service provider who uses haproxy on Core i7
machines and who has already reached 5 Gbps of sustained traffic
with recent intel dual-port NICs (though I'm not sure exactly which
ones). This is with very little CPU usage too, less than 2-3% user
and 15% system+softirq. On previous machines (quad core xeons), it
was impossible to go beyond 3 Gbps, it looked like the chipset was
the limitating factor too (though I don't precisely remember which
one it was).

I really blamed the NICs because this guys machine was about 4 times
more powerful than mine, but apparently it was just a chipset issue.

I also happen to have a customer who recently received a few Sun NXGE,
mounted in Sun x2100-m2 using an nvidia chipset which I tested OK at
10 Gbps with my myri10GE NICs. I'll try to see if I can run some tests
there, as Davem once said those NICs are really good too.

All in all, I find it really cool that our beloved OS scales that
well with the hardware :-)

Regards,
Willy

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Messages in current thread:
Achieved 10Gbit/s bidirectional routing, Jesper Dangaard Brouer, (Wed Jul 15, 9:50 am)
Re: Achieved 10Gbit/s bidirectional routing, Bill Fink, (Wed Jul 15, 8:22 pm)
Re: Achieved 10Gbit/s bidirectional routing, Jesper Dangaard Brouer, (Thu Jul 16, 2:39 am)
Re: Achieved 10Gbit/s bidirectional routing, Bill Fink, (Thu Jul 16, 8:38 am)
Re: Achieved 10Gbit/s bidirectional routing, Willy Tarreau, (Fri Jul 17, 1:35 pm)
Re: Achieved 10Gbit/s bidirectional routing, Bill Fink, (Fri Jul 17, 4:38 pm)
Re: Achieved 10Gbit/s bidirectional routing, Jesper Dangaard Brouer, (Sat Jul 18, 12:14 am)