I've been experimenting with the idea of doing channel bonding as a means of improving the performance of some heavily used file servers. Currently I am using a single Intel 1000MT interface on each file server and it has rather lack luster performance.
I've set two ports of my switch to 'shared' (an Extreme BlackDiamond 6800) and am using an Intel 1000MT Dual Port for the bonding interfaces. The performance increase with I see is marginally better than just the one interface (70MB/s [bonded] vs 60MB/s [single]) which is slightly disappointing. I am using ifstat and iostat (for disk throughput, 30MB/s on a 3ware 7500-12 yet again disappointing) to monitor and a variant of tcpblast to generate traffic. I'm using 4 other machines (on the same blade on the switch) to generate the traffice to the bonded interface all are similar hardware with varrying versions of FreeBSD. In order to get the numbers as high as I have I've enabled polling (some stability issues being used under SMP). Before I dropped everything and moved over to trying out ng_fec I wanted to get a few opinions on other things I can check or try. These servers typically have anywhere between 20-100 clients reading and writing many large files as fast as they can. So far the machines only perform well when there are fewer than 20 clients. The whole point of the experiment is increase performance of our current resources instead of buying more servers. I really don't know what to expect (in terms of performance) from this but just based on the 'ratings' on the individual parts this machine is not preforming very well. In case anyone has any ideas I've included the 'specs' of the hardware below. Hardware: Dual Intel Xeon CPU 2.66GHz Intel Server SE7501BR2 Motherboard 2X 512 MB Registered ECC DDR RAM 3ware 7500-12 (12x120GB, RAID-5) Intel PRO/1000 MT Dual Port (em0,1) Intel PRO/1000 MT (On board) (em2) Switch: Extreme Black Diamond 6800 Gigabit Blade: G24T^3 51052 Kernel: FreeBSD phoenix 5.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE #1: Wed Apr 20 13:33:09 CDT 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/src/sys/i386/compile/SMP i386 Channel Bonding commands used: ifconfig em0 up ifconfig em1 up kldload ng_ether.ko ngctl mkpeer em0: one2many upper one ngctl connect em0: em0:upper lower many0 ngctl connect em1: em0:upper lower many1 echo Allow em1 to xmit/recv em0 frames ngctl msg em1: setpromisc 1 ngctl msg em1: setautosrc 0 ngctl msg em0:upper setconfig "{ xmitAlg=1 failAlg=1 enabledLinks=[ 1 1 ] }" ifconfig em0 A.B.C.D netmask 255.255.255.0 Contents of /etc/sysctl.conf: net.inet.tcp.inflight_enable=1 net.inet.tcp.sendspace=32767 net.inet.tcp.recvspace=32767 net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0 vfs.hirunningspace=10485760 vfs.lorunningspace=10485760 net.inet.tcp.local_slowstart_flightsize=32767 net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=1 kern.maxfilesperproc=2048 vfs.vmiodirenable=1 kern.ipc.somaxconn=4096 kern.maxfiles=65536 kern.polling.enable=1 -- Sean _______________________________________________ freebsd-performance@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-performance To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"