Packet loss with traffic shaper and routing

[Ferdinand Goldmann]

tpeixoto at widesoft.com.br wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I did that and compiled the kernel.
> Then I restarted the system and enabled sysctl kern.polling.enable=1
> 
> It seems that it has no effect in the system. Maybe bge driver doesn't
> like polling?

At least from a quick glance in the polling(4) manpage I cannot see that bge
is among the supported devices.

If you want to use polling, I suppose that you need to enable it via ifconfig,
too:

     polling
             If the driver has user-configurable polling(4) support, select
             the polling mode on the interface.


> At this moment, I'm getting more than 50% interrupts and 20% packets lost.
> I also disabled HT in BIOS and the interrupts are now passing 80% mark.
> Don't know what else to do. Aren't these cards supposed to work at
> 100Mbits or 1Gbit? They are failing with 12Mbits traffic on a 100Mbits
> LAN. Something is wrong and I am having a hard time trying to identify the
> problem.
> 
> Thanks for the hints, anything else would be greatly appreciated.

Several wild guesses from my own experiences here:
- SMP + networking in 5.x does not work too well, using em(4) I experienced
  VERY poor performance (only ~5MB/s over a Gbit link)
- Try upgrading to 6.x (as others have already suggested). I experienced all
  kind of weird problems with 5.x, and although there is no proof that the
  problems were actually related to 5.x, 6.x seems to work better.
- What's the value of nmbclusters? Have you checked netstat -m? Do you see
  memory requests for network memory denied?
- 50% interrupts on such a fast machine is quite high. I currently experience
  about 30% interrupt load using two em(4) cards, shaping for about ~2000
  clients on a 3.8GHz Xeon.

Kind regards
-- 
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