10 gigabit ethernet

[Mark Komarinski]

On 1/27/2011 8:13 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>> From: discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org [mailto:discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org] On Behalf
>> Of Rajiv Aaron Manglani
>>
>> have you tried using jumbo frames? you might be able to implement that
>> with your current hardware.
> At most, that could possibly enable another 1% performance increase...
Jumbo frames won't necessarily increase performance, but it does reduce 
CPU overhead.  If the CPU is busy doing other things than building a 
1500 MTU packet, then moving to jumbo frames may increase the amount of 
data the CPU can process and thus improve performance/throughput.  If 
the CPU isn't heavily loaded, then you may be closer to 1%.

The down side (as we found out) is that everything on that subnet has to 
be 9000 MTU.  The last time we tried, we had a few NICs that didn't 
support jumbo frames and mixing 1500 and 9000 MTUs don't work all that 
well.  If it does work, then you'll likely see better performance out of 
something like a NFS server.

-Mark