It could do some good to think of the scale of the problem and maybe the driver can tune to the hardware.
First, is 8k packet buffers a reasonable default on a GigE port? Well... on a GigE port, you could have from 100k pps (packets per second) at 1500 bytes to 500k pps at around 300 bytes to truly pathological rates of packets (2M pps at the Ethernet-minimum of 64 bytes). 8k buffers vanish in 1/10th of a second in the 1500 byte case and that doesn't even really speak to the buffers getting emptied by other software. Do you maybe want to have a switch whereby the GigE port is in performance or non-performance mode? Do you want to assume that systems with GigE ports are also not pathologically low in memory? Perhaps in 10 or 100 megabit mode, the driver should make smaller rings? For that matter, if mbufs come in a page's worth at a time, what's the drawback of scaling them up and down with network vs. memory vs. cache pressure? _______________________________________________ freebsd-net@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-net To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-net-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"