I have _got_ to make CPU utilization enabled by default one of these
days :) At least for mechanisms which don't require calibration.
Heh, I've skipped the calibration chapter in the netperf manual. :-D
Should revert to it.
Under linux, the CPU utilization mechanism in netperf does not require
calibration, so you can add a -c (and -C if the remote is also linux) to
the global command line options. Netperf will the report CPU util and
calculate the "service demand" which will be the quantity of CPU
consumed per unit of work.
So things becomes much better when the message size increases
(I think the netperf then eating less cpu, and gives some precessing
time to the kernel?).
Unless the compiler isn't doing a very good job, or perhaps if you've
enabled histograms (./configure --enable-histogram) and set verbosity to
2 or more (not the case here), netperf itself shouldn't be consuming
very much CPU at all up in user space. Now, as the size of the buffers
passed to the transport increases, it does mean fewer system calls per
KB transferred, which should indeed be more efficient.
What is the nature of the DMA stream between the two tests? I find it
interesting that the TCP Mb/s went up by more than the CPU MHz and
wonder how much the Bus MHz came into play there - perhaps there were
more DMA's to setup or across a broader memory footprint for TCP than
for UDP.
The gianfar indeed does a lot of dma on the "buffer descriptors", so
probably the bus speed matters a lot. And combination of CPU and Bus
gives the final result.
Do you have any way to calculate bus utilization - logic analyzer, or
perhaps some performance counters in the hardware?
If you have an HP-UX or Solaris system handy to act as a receiver, you
might give that a try - it would be interesting to see the effect of
their ACK avoidance heuristics on TCP throughput. One non-trivial
difference I keep forgetting to mention is that TCP will have that
returning ACK stream that UDP will not.
rick jones
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