small packets belonging to the same connection could be coalesced by TCP, but this may help the case where multiple parallel connections are sending small packets.
It's not just small packets. The cost of calling hard_start_xmit/byte was rather high on your particular device. I've seen PCI read transaction in hard_start_xmit taking ~10,000 cycles on one particular device. Count the cycles your brand of NIC is taking in it's xmit_routine. The worse it is, the stronger your case for cluster transmits.
Also, I think, you don't have to chain skbs, they're already chained in Qdisc->q. All you have to do is take the whole q and try to shove it at the device hoping for better results. But then, if you have rather big backlog, you run the risk of reordering packets if you have to requeue.
Thanks Sridhar
-- Gagan
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