NIC driver question

[Frank Bonnet]

Nathan Vidican wrote:
> Frank Bonnet wrote:
>> Hello
>>
>> I will receive in few days my new mail server the machine will
>> be an IBM X3650 bi xeon.
>>
>> I wonder what would be the "best" network interface to
>> plug in (if necessary) as I don't know for now what is
>> the builtin interfaces in this machine.
>>
>> To be clear I'm asking gurus on what is the "best FreeBSD supported"
>> NIC driver to avoid eventual perfomances problems.
>>
>> Thanks a lot.
> As for 100mbit cards:
> 
> Hands-down, Intel 'fxp'-driven cards... rock solid in terms of 
> performance and stability; never had a single unit go bad, used hundreds 
> of them, including dual and quad-port cards.
> 
> On the gigabit side:
> 
> I've had great luck with broadcom cards using the 'bge' driver, and a 
> few intel cards utilizing the 'em', but nothing real extensive or 
> saturated enough to authoratively say they work under extreme pressure 
> or anything. I've got a couple of dual-opteron servers here with dual 
> on-board broadcom gigabit cards that have ben running flawlessly for 
> over 2 years now, (uptime 378 days on one, the others were rebooted 
> several weeks ago to be relocated to a different rack). Knock-on-wood, 
> no panics or mysterious network outages as of yet - so I'd say they're 
> fairly stable - but again, never end up near saturated over here to give 
> you an answer on performance.
> 
> Anyhow, just my two cents - if you don't need gigabit, ya can't go wrong 
> with Intel 'fxp'-driven cards :)
> 

OK thank you Nathan

I'll need the gigabit X 2 as we extensively use the imap protocol
( 500 , 600 imap processes during work hours )

thanks for your feedback

-- 
Cordialement
Frank Bonnet