AMD 64bit-powered Network performance

[Robin Humble]

interesting study!
which kernel and drivers did you use for those machines?

On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 04:57:18PM -0400, Mark Lane wrote:
>I'm a little surprised that the intel gigE did that much better than
>the Marvel Yukon. It could be that Tyan has it on a PCIe or PCI-X bus
>and not PCI 32. I wouldn't be surprised if ASUS used a 32 bit bus for
>their gigE because it is only Desktop Chipset.  As I said it isn't a
>fair comparison.

in my experience (GigE beowulfs) the driver versions and driver tweaks
that you use make a _huge_ difference. eg. it's normal for us to get
~890Mbit from e1000 on built-in PCI-X 64/66. low latency is more
important though, and harder to get.
  http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/mediawiki/index.php/E1000_performance_patch

I haven't got anything good out of Marvell yet - the sk98lin driver
appears to be total crap with bizarre dropouts, and skge is low
performance so far - only 500-660Mbit, but then again I haven't worked
with it much compared to e1000.

PCI-X 64/66 or PCIe shouldn't make any difference as they have both
more than the 2Gbit needed to drive a gigE card at full duplex.

running a gigE card in PCI 32/33 (max 132MB/s) would be a waste though
- it'll never go full speed.

cheers,
robin
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