Re: e1000 full-duplex TCP performance well below wire speed

From: Bruce Allen
Date: Wed Jan 30 2008 - 09:02:34 EST


Hi David,

Thanks for your note.

(The performance of a full duplex stream should be close to 1Gb/s in
both directions.)

This is not a reasonable expectation.

ACKs take up space on the link in the opposite direction of the
transfer.

So the link usage in the opposite direction of the transfer is
very far from zero.

Indeed, we are not asking to see 1000 Mb/s. We'd be happy to see 900 Mb/s.

Netperf is trasmitting a large buffer in MTU-sized packets (min 1500 bytes). Since the acks are only about 60 bytes in size, they should be around 4% of the total traffic. Hence we would not expect to see more than 960 Mb/s.

We have run these same tests on older kernels (with Broadcomm NICS) and gotten above 900 Mb/s full duplex.

Cheers,
Bruce
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