Poor Throughput with 10Gb NIC HP NC522SFP on SLES10 SP3

[lianwang513]

Hi, I need to know if anybody has any experience with 10G cards on Linux. I am trying to use HP NC522SFP 10Gb fiber cards on a Proliant DL380 G5/G6 running SLES10 SP3 and are not seeing the throughput we expect. 5.9Gb is the best we have been able to get. Has anybody gotten better performance? Was any special configuration needed? Thanks!

linux-dl380-g5:/usr/local/bin # netperf -t UDP_STREAM -L 18.0.0.3 -H 18.0.0.5 -p 12865 -l 30 -- -m 1316

UDP UNIDIRECTIONAL SEND TEST from 18.0.0.3 (18.0.0.3) port 0 AF_INET to 18.0.0.5 (18.0.0.5) port 0 AF_INET

Socket Message Elapsed Messages

Size Size Time Okay Errors Throughput

bytes bytes secs # # 10^6bits/sec



262144 1316 30.00 6818459 0 2392.65

10485760 30.00 6818459 2392.65

[Michael Leu]

I have a few BL460c G6 running SLES 10 SP3, they have the Broadcom BCM57711E chip. This chip seems to have some known limitations, see Rick Jones' reply at Sep 20, 2010 17:19:11:
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-BladeSystem/Flex-10-VC-Drops-Packets-5-Mega-Packet-Per-Second/m-p/5254423#M16763

Also HP provided drivers should probably be used for the card... SLES 10 SP3 ships with some very old drivers.

Besides this I don't have any knowledge/experience with network performance and throughput, sorry.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

You may find better drivers as part of PSP on HP's website.

Also note that you will never, due to OS overhead and switch architecture get a NIC card to go at its maximum rated speed.

SEP

[Alan_152]

My experience has been that if you can get 10% of a card's advertised capacity on a consistent basis, then you are doing pretty well, all things considered.

[jsikorski]

Checkout the stats from:

# ethtool -S ethX

..after you run the test (where ethX is the 10g interface).

Look for errors, failures, or anything else that sounds undesirable. Post the output here if you're not sure.