vr speed issues

[Charles Sprickman]

On Fri, 1 Dec 2006, Jamie Clark wrote:

> Charles Sprickman wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I spent some time trying to track down slow tcp performance on a small 
>> office switched 100 LAN.  We just put in a number of whitebox PCs running 
>> FreeBSD 6.1-p2/PC-BSD 1.2 that all have onboard Via Rhine 10/100 ethernet 
>> controllers.  Performace with scp was around 200KB/s, ftp wavered between 
>> 300-500KB/s.  This did not appear to be a duplex mismatch - unmanaged 
>> switch showed them all at 100/Full, put some other hosts on the same 
>> ports/cabling and got near wire speed.  I took the cabling out of the 
>> equation, the switch, no improvement.  The only thing that got me decent 
>> performance was putting two hosts back to back with an xover cable.
>> 
>> I eventually realized that the only hosts with any speed issues in the 
>> office were these boxes with the Via ethernet.  Putting an equally cheap 
>> DLink (RealTek/rl) in one of them gave me much better performance.
> [...]
>
> There might be something in this. I have a 2-3 yr old box with an Asus A7V8X 
> mainboard. This has been running 4.10-RELEASE for about 2.5 years and 
> yesterday I decided to bite the bullet and update to RELENG_6. I also decided 
> to upgrade the internal storage as well so this entailed a backup/restore 
> over the wire.
>
> Backing up the 4.10 box was within an acceptable margin of wire speed (~8MB/s 
> on 100M ethernet) given that a router was in the middle. That's roughly how 
> the box has always performed.
>
> After installing 6.1_RELEASE and updating to RELENG_6 I started the restore. 
> Maxed out at about 380kB/s. Now I tested the backup speed again and it has 
> also dropepd to 380k.

Excellent!  That's some good info.  Same hardware, and you get performance 
like I'm seeing.

There's lots of changes.  :)

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/pci/if_vr.c.diff?r1=1.26.2.14&r2=1.116&f=h


> This would definitely lead me to assume that something has gone awry in the 
> driver over the past years. Unfortunately I have not been frequently updating 
> this machine (my imap server) so I have no idea when the driver became 
> broken.
>
> I realize that this is not much help in tracking the problem - but it seems 
> to concur with the problem noted here earlier.

I'm going to dig up some kind of 4.11 live cd, a 5.x live cd and some kind 
of simple linux live cd and have him do some quick ftp tests under each.

If I see the same thing, then I'll file a PR and call this a regression.

Thanks!

Charles

> FreeBSD 6.2-PRERELEASE #0: Thu Nov 30 16:29:04 SGT
>
> pciconf:
> vr0 at pci0:18:0:  class=0x020000 card=0x80a11043 chip=0x30651106 rev=0x74 
> hdr=0x00
>   vendor   = 'VIA Technologies Inc'
>   device   = 'VT6102 Rhine II PCI Fast Ethernet Controller'
>   class    = network
>   subclass = ethernet
>
> dmesg:
> vr0: <VIA VT6102 Rhine II 10/100BaseTX> port 0xb000-0xb0ff mem 
> 0xf2800000-0xf28000ff at device 18.0 on pci0
> miibus0: <MII bus> on vr0
> rlphy0: <RTL8201L 10/100 media interface> on miibus0
> rlphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
> vr0: Ethernet address: 00:0c:6e:3d:b9:0e
>
> $ ifconfig
> vr0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
>       inet6 fe80::20c:6eff:fe3d:b90e%vr0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
>       inet 203.117.131.34 netmask 0xffffffc0 broadcast 203.117.131.63
>       inet 203.117.131.35 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 203.117.131.35
>       ether 00:0c:6e:3d:b9:0e
>       media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
>       status: active
>
> -Jamie
>