[Click] 10GE Click performance

[Luigi Rizzo]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 2:13 AM, rchertov <rchertov at cs.ucsb.edu> wrote:
> I finally got my hands on some 10GE equipment and started to play
> around with Click.  So I noticed the following.  On 2.6.24.7 patched
> kernel using 3.7.17 ixgbe driver, I get around 200K pps when running a
> node as a bridge (click pulled from git today).  However, when on
> exactly the same node I run the exactly same test but I use
> click-1.7.0rc1, then I can easily achieve 300K pps.  I have also tried
> 2.6.35.14-106.fc14.i686 using the latest Click and I still got around
> 200K pps.
>
>
> I am curious of people's experiences when running Click on 10GE
> equipment.  Has anybody got the RouteBricks MQ code running?  Everything
> compiled for me, but I get pretty strange packet forwarding performance,
> where the data is either delayed by quite a bit or it is just corrupted.
>
> My fancy one way bridge config
>
> fd :: FromDevice(eth2, PROMISC true, BURST 32)
>    -> ctr1 :: AverageCounter
>    -> q :: Queue(4096)
>    -> ctr2 :: AverageCounter
>    -> ToDevice(eth3, BURST 64);

remember that fetching timestamps, even staying in-kernel,
is extremely expensive (in the order of 250-500ns) so if you use
one of those elements in your pipeline you won't be able
to get decent performance.

try to remove one or both counters and see if that improves
the throughput (this said, 200 or 300kpps really seems too
low to be explained by timestamps)

cheers
luigi



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