On Fri, 19 Dec 2008, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> Hi Krzysztof,
>
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 08:29:00AM +0100, Krzysztof Oledzki wrote:
>> On Fri, 19 Dec 2008, Willy Tarreau wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 12:13:18AM +0100, Benoit wrote:
>>>> Willy Tarreau a écrit :
>>>>>> As for us, we had to double the haproxy boxes to get past the 40Mbps of
>>>>>> http traffic ....
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> what type of traffic do you have and what type of network cards do you
>>>>> have ?
>>>>> The smallest machines I have (fanless AMD Geode 500 MHz, 2.5W of average
>>>>> power
>>>>> consumption) already supports 100 Mbps and up to 2000 connections/s with
>>>>> a
>>>>> dirt cheap VIA Rhine NIC. So there's definitely a problem with your
>>>>> setup !
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Server is an HP blade, with 4 Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708S
>>>> port, bonded two by two.
>>>> and it's a bi dual core Xeon 5150#2.66Ghz cpu with 4Gb of memory system
>>>> dedicated to haproxy.
>>>>
>>>> The cpu load is low, very very low, however when at 40 or 50Mbps
>>>> connection time start to go up to the roof
>>>> ( up to 3/4s sometimes, instead of 180ms of total processing time), and
>>>> activating the backup server fixed this
>>>> so it isn't of problem with the backends
>>>
>>> OK I understand better now. At a customer's, we've been using HP blades
>>> with BNX2 NICs too, and we disabled them. The packet loss is terrible on
>>> those crappy NICs.
>>
>> I can't confirm this. I have two BCM5708 NICs currently running on
>> 2.6.26.8:
>>
>> # lspci|grep Eth
>> 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708
>> Gigabit Ethernet (rev 12)
>> 07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708
>> Gigabit Ethernet (rev 12)
>>
>> I have never experienced performance issues with these NICs and from my
>> POV bnx2/tg3 NICs are much better than for example e1000 ones as there is
>> no IPMI+VLAN problem with Broadcoms.
>
> That's getting interesting! What machine is this ?
Dell PowerEdge 1950
> Maybe those are only the
> NICs in HP blades which are crappy ?
Maybe.
> Or maybe just their firmware ? Also,
> what bandwidth are you pushing out ?
My latest peak is at about 400Mb/s
> I started seeing massive drops at about
> the same bitrates as Benoit (about 40/50 Mbps).
40/50 is indeed very poor!
>> Maybe this is a firmware issue? Have you tried upgrading it? Mine is
>> 4.4.1:
>>
>> # ethtool -i eth0
>> driver: bnx2
>> version: 1.7.5
>> firmware-version: 4.4.1 ipms 1.6.0
>> bus-info: 0000:03:00.0
>>
>> AFAIK currently this is the latest available firmware.
>
> Clearly those are not the same versions I have here :
>
> 1) machine on RHEL5 2.6.18-53:
>
> # /sbin/ethtool -i eth2
> driver: bnx2
> version: 1.5.11
> firmware-version: 1.9.6
> bus-info: 0000:05:00.0
>
> 2) machine on RHEL5 updated to 2.6.18-92.1.17
> driver: bnx2
> version: 1.6.9
> firmware-version: 1.9.6
> bus-info: 0000:03:00.0
>
> I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a different firmware when booted on
> 2.6.25, which would imply the firmware is provided with the driver.
AFAIK there are two firmwares: one stored at NIC and one uploaded by the driver. However, I'm not sure how and if they are correlated.
> Are you sure you can upgrade it yourself ?
Yes, I'm 100% sure. I have done it several times on both IBM and Dell servers.
> If so, I'm interested in the
> procedure, as I could suggest my customer to try it on one machine.
The firmware should be available on vendor's website. For example:
http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/format.aspx?cs=RC1078552&l=pl&s=pad&deviceid=10264&libid=5&releaseid=R197246 https://www-304.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/docdisplay?lndocid=MIGR-5070004&brandind=5000020
Best regards,
Krzysztof Olędzki Received on 2008/12/19 10:40
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : 2008/12/19 10:46 CET