2x CPU 2400 Mhz Xeon 2x E1000 Intel Corp. 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Fibre Optic) 2 gig of ram Adaptec AIC-7902B U320 w 2 Drives in Raid 0 configuration.
The network cards are in 64 bit PCI-X 133 Mhz slots.
The Operating System is Red Hat Enterprise 2 with the 2.4.21-15.EL kernel... however I have seen the following problem when running a pretty generic Linux 2.4 kernel without RH patches.
The problem is throughput. On some HTTP tests we get about 750 Mbits per second through the production firewall, but in other tests with a more diverse workload, we only see about 400 mbits per second. Looking at the mpstats and sar data, I see that the CPU's are spending all their time dealing with softirq's on the 2 cards. At this point, I am trying to figure out how to get a better idea of what I can do to improve performance.
I am guessing that the card is sending a SoftIRQ per packet and am wondering if I need different cards, different proc or module settings to get NAPI to work (or if NAPI+netfilter is possible). Or that I am completely missing the obvious.
-- Stephen John Smoogen smoogen@xxxxxxxx Los Alamos National Lab CCN-5 Sched 5/40 PH: 4-0645 Ta-03 SM-1498 MailStop B255 DP 10S Los Alamos, NM 87545
