On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 07:35:11AM +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote:
On Fri, 2010-01-29 at 14:59 -0500, Kelvin Ku wrote:
On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 12:22:05PM +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote:
which was throttling the CPUs to 1.6 GHz (from a maximum of 2.4 GHz). I attempted to remedy this by setting InterruptThrottleRate=0,0 in the e1000e driver, after which we had one full day of testing with zero rx_missed_errors, but the application still reported packet loss.
rx_missed_error usually get triggered when the kernel is slow to handle incoming hardware interrupts. There's a trade-off here, increase the interrupt rate and you'll increase the kernel CPU usage as the expense of lower latency - decrease the interrupt rate, and you'll reduce the CPU usage at the expense of a higher chance of hitting the RX queue limit. I'd suggest you try setting the InterruptThrottleRate to 1000, while increasing the RX queues to 4096. (sbin/ethtool -G DEVICE rx 4096)
You could try enabling multi-queue by adding IntterruptType=2, RSS=NUM_OF_QUEUE and MQ=1 to your modprobe.conf.d.
I'll try these suggestions later today. Note that I was able to disable interrupt throttling on the on-board 82574L NICs without seeing any rx_missed_errors.
Did it help?
I switched to an 82576 NIC. The kernel igb driver (version 1.3.16-k2) has multiqueue enabled by default with 4 rx and 4 tx queues. I'm running with 4096 rx ring entries enabled.
The target app is performing well on the igb NIC whereas on the e1000e NIC it was missing packets. I say "missing" rather than "dropped" because these packets don't show up on any error counters. However, in throughput testing, we can't receive faster than 905-910 Mbps whereas we can reliably receive at 950 Mbps on our older non-Nehalem machines.
Can you post the output of $ mpstat -P 1 ALL during peak load?
We run "mpstat -P 5 ALL" continuously; is this sufficient resolution? I've attached the mpstat output from the 09:30-10:30 yesterday, which is one of the busiest hours of the day for multicast traffic.
~15'000 interrupts/core seems rather high to me - especially considering the fact that this is a 1GbE link. Reducing the InterruptThrottleRate to 1000/5000 while increasing the queue count (ethtool -G ... rx ...) should decrease it.
Also, here is the top of the output from powertop. Are you running with C-STATE enabled? It is somewhat troubling that more than half of the time is spent in the most power-saving state (C3), but I think this is averaged across all CPUs.
I usually disable power management. Be advised, that we are using 10GbE cards and not 1GbE, so we are more vulnerable to scaling-the-core-down-right-when-the-cards-starts-flooding-the-hell-out-of-it...
I notice that ASPM is enabled on the 82576 NIC and the PCIe ports. Have you disabled ASPM? Disabling C-STATE had no effect on throughput or app performance.
I'm going to test with ASPM disabled later today.
P.S. Please post your complete hardware configuration. (Board, CPU, in-which slot did you put the NIC, etc)
- Gilboa
I've attached dmidecode and lspci output. Here's a summary:
Motherboard: Supermicro X8DTL-iF CPU: Single Xeon E5530 RAM: 3x1GB 1333MHz DDR3 ECC Registered
The 82576 NIC is inserted into a PCIe 2.0 x8 slot.
- Kelvin