Re: major network performance difference between 2.4 and 2.6.2-rc2

From: Felipe Alfaro Solana (felipe_alfaro_at_linuxmail.org)
Date: 01/31/04

  • Next message: Matthias Andree: "Re: khubd crash on scanner disconnect"
    To: Jim Faulkner <jfaulkne@ccs.neu.edu>
    Date:	Sat, 31 Jan 2004 15:28:26 +0100
    
    

    On Sat, 2004-01-31 at 04:06, Jim Faulkner wrote:
    > There is a major networking performance problem on my machine under recent
    > 2.6 kernels. I have a dual Athlon-MP machine with an onboard Intel
    > Ethernet Pro 100 device, which can use either the e100 or eepro100 driver.
    >
    > I ran some tests under 2.4 and recent 2.6 kernels to see what kind of
    > performance I could get. I tested using both ftp and samba, the client
    > machine is a windows box with an onboard 3com 3c920b controller. They
    > are connected through a D-Link 100 megabit full duplex switch.
    >
    > Under both 2.6.2-rc2 and 2.6.2-rc2-mm2, the performance is pretty bad.
    > Copying 4.3 gigabytes of data from the linux machine to the windows box
    > via samba takes about 35 minutes. LFTP shows FTP transfers from the linux
    > box to the windows box to go at about 2 megabytes per second. The
    > performance is even worse in the opposite direction, LFTP shows transfers
    > from the linux box to the windows box to be around 1.5 megabytes per
    > second.
    >
    > I repeated the above tests with both the e100 driver and the eepro100
    > driver and got the same results. Running ifconfig shows "errors:0
    > dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0" and "errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0
    > carrier:0 collisions:0" for the device.
    >
    > Unfortunately my OS (unstable Gentoo) does not appear to support 2.4
    > kernels anymore, so I had to use a Knoppix CD to test 2.4 kernels. I am
    > using Knoppix nov 19 2003 version, which I believe uses a 2.4.21 or 2.4.22
    > kernel. It uses the eepro100 driver.
    >
    > Under the Knoppix 2.4 kernel, using the exact same samba configuration
    > file, I was able to copy 4.3 gigabytes of data from the linux machine to
    > the windows machine in about 8 minutes. Copying in the opposite direction
    > takes about 10 minutes. Unfortunately Knoppix doesn't include an FTP
    > server so I wasn't able to test that.
    >
    > It appears that my network device is capable of 4 times the throughput
    > under 2.4 kernels versus recent 2.6 kernels. I believe this problem arose
    > recently, probably sometime since 2.6.0, since I only recently noticed
    > this performance issue.
    >
    > I don't know if this problem is specific to my configuration or not, so
    > included below is lots of configuration information. Please note that the
    > funky modules like nvidia, vmware and cbm were not loaded when I ran my
    > tests.

    I have experienced lower network performance with 2.6 kernels and 3Com
    cards. On my laptop, downstream traffic (download) seems to get nearly
    full throughput (~10MB/s) but upstream traffic never rises from 3MB/s.
    On other computers, the throughput is more symmetric, but not as good as
    it was with 2.4 kernels. The problem seems to be related with a possible
    hardware bug on my 3Com card, but I have been unable to confirm.

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