> I'm working on increasing the performance of our firewalls, 
> we picked up 
> two of the newer v2 syskonnect cards for testing, I was 
> getting pretty 
> low performance from the bridge so I started testing things 
> using a card 
> as an endpoint.
> 
> I was using Iperf to generate packets, but to make sure it 
> wasn't iperf
> causing a problem, I also did some quick tests with ping -f 
> which exhibit
> much the same behavior.
> 
> 192.168.0.7 is an OpenBSD host running 3.7, fresh install, with the 
> network configured.
> 192.168.0.5 is a linux host used in this test.
> 
> If I run some udp packets, 1mbps with the bsd box receiving
> no problems. But transmitting 1mbps stream eats up the CPU.

While testing with iperf I noticed it eats the CPU (sys and usr)
when running UDP tests but not with TCP ones. I suggest you
try monitoring CPU int usage instead of overall CPU usage.

> 
> When increasing to higher levels of traffic RX performance
> seems to get affected also, the cpu activity becomes very bursty.
> I'm still trying to characterize that a bit better.
<snip> 
> iostat 1
> -----------
>    5  136  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00   0  0  0  0100
>     7  137  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00   1  0  0  0 99
>     4  135  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00   0  0  0  0100
>     3  447  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00  12  0 21  0 67
>     0 1103  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00  33  0 67  0  0
>     0  131  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00  33  0 67  0  0
>     0  131  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00  36  0 64  0  0
>        tty            wd0             cd0             cpu
>   tin tout  KB/t t/s MB/s   KB/t t/s MB/s  us ni sy in id
>     0  131  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00  31  0 69  0  0
>     0  244  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00  29  0 71  0  0
>     0  259  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00  31  0 69  0  0
>     0  131  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00  29  0 71  0  0
>     0  130  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00  30  0 70  0  0
>     0  131  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00  36  0 64  0  0
>     0  354  0.00   0 0.00   0.00   0 0.00  22  0 38  0 40

I don't know if CPU int usage data for iostat is accurate
or not, but your CPU shows 0% int usage. It's probably 
iperf eating the rest and your NIC may be idleing. Push
some more udp mbps and see if the NIC can take it.

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