Network performance tuning article

[Chuck Swiger]

Hendrik Scholz wrote:
> Hi!

Hi, Hendrik--

> I've started a document about performance tuning some time ago and as of
> now it is in a state where others could benefit from it/contribute to
> it. I've put all documents on
> http://home.raisdorf.net/public/networkperf/
> http://home.raisdorf.net/public/networkperf/article.html contains the
> complete article rendered as (ah, you already guessed that :)) HTML.

Congratulations on managing to get the docbook port working, your article marked 
up, and pushed out.  :-)  I'm not sure what kind of feedback you're looking for, 
although I can think of some obvious things:

A paragraph should be more than one sentence.
A section should be more than one paragraph.

...but it's likely that you already intend to add more content and expand 
sections as time and motivation permit.

	--

Something like:

"The right NIC can drastically reduce the load caused by network traffic. Modern 
systems can easily saturate a 100Mbit link with a low-cost card. Since these 
cards only support a very basic set of features (like the Realtek 8139 based 
cards) the main CPU has to perform simple tasks which could be offloaded to the 
NIC itself. If you want to run a busy machine saving some bucks on the NIC is 
definitly wrong."

...should be spell-checked and changed in structure.  Try:

"The right NIC can drastically reduce the system overheard caused by network 
traffic.  Modern systems can easily saturate a 100Mbit link even with a low-cost 
card.  However, since cheap NICs (for example, ones based on the Realtek 8139 
chipset) only support a very basic set of features, the main CPU has to perform 
simple tasks which could otherwise be offloaded to the NIC itself.  If you want 
to run a busy machine, it's important to purchase a high-quality NIC."

	--

If I was a member of the FreeBSD project who approved documentation 
submissions-- which I'm not-- I would probably also like to see some feedback as 
to where this article should go, what it's related to (eg, the tuning manpage), 
and perhaps other factors which I am not familiar with.

-- 
-Chuck