Re: NIC / driver performance with libpcap

[Andy Howell <AndyHowell () raitechnology com>]

Fabian,


> As I don't know such a list, I just tell what i know. By the way, which 
> link layer technology are we talking about? 

I'm primarily interested in 1-Gig Ethernet right now, though I'll need 
to look at 10-Gig at some point.

> For 1-GigEthernet my experience shows that the intel cards are working 
> quite well. You do not want to use cheaper ones like e.g. Netgear those at 
> least were not able to process a fully loaded link and then the driver 
> crashed. Sysconnect cards are as well working ok, though to as fast as the 
> intels. By the way you want to enable NAPI for Linux.

I've heard similar results on Intel.

I've found that interrupt coalescing makes a big difference in 
throughput. In my application, I'm summarizing traffic at 100Msec 
intervals. I'm not too concerned about the extra latency introduced by 
the coalescing.

I'm putting together a simple benchmark program so I can get a better 
understanding of various factors affecting performance.

The two metrics I looking at now are:

 - What throughput can I get before seeing dropped packets
 - CPU usage

All I do with the incoming packets is count bytes and packets.
I welcome any feedback on this.

> For 10-GigEthernet i heard (no own experience) that the Neterion Cards are 
> good. Those are available in a special Solaris version as well. 

I'll take a look at Neterion.

Thanks,

        Andy
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