The 440 has 2 internal gigabit adapters (ce's).
You might be hitting a Sun design issue? To drive one ce to 900mbit/s their
blueprint says one needs several UltraSparcIII CPUs:
http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0203/817-1657.pdf
See this article for some tuning that is possible;
http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0404/817-6925.pdf
Solaris 9 was suppose to have very good TCP/IP CPU utilization though?
Robert Maiello
Pioneer Data Systems
On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 17:40:34 +0100, Oscar Olsson <spam1 AT QBRANCH DOT SE> wrote:
>We have the following environment in brief: A sun V440 with 4 CPUs, and
>8GB RAM. To this server, a SpectraLogic T950 is attached via a fibre
>channel loop. We have a dual port Sun HBA adapter (SG-XPCI2FC-JF2) that
>uses both ports to reach different drives in the library. It is also
>running Sun Trunking Software v1.3 to connect to the network, since both
>ce interfaces are bundled as a port-channel. Both interfaces are running
>1000mbit/fdx. The load-balance algorithm used for outbound traffic is
>ip-source-dest pair hashing. We're running Solaris 9, with latest patches
>for OS, HBA etc. Some tweaks have been applied to /etc/system, such as
>maxphys, number of file descriptors, maxusers etc. The HBA is on its own
>PCI bus in the correct PCI slot type.
>
>The problem is that we can't get maximum performance out of all 6 SAIT-1
>drives at once. When the server transits about 900mbit of data, the CPU
>load has reached a point where there are no more cycles available. At that
>time, the user space processes account for approx 15% and the kernel for
>approx 80%.
>
>I'm wondering why the kernel consumes so much CPU, considering the
>relatively low throughput? What part could be causing this? Is it the LUS
>driver, or the HBA driver? Or something else? Can one find out?
>
>I was thinking that maybe the HBA doesn't have any good CPU offloading
>functions for handling I/O, but that's just a theory. Is there any other
>way one can find out which part of the system causes such a high CPU load?
>Its not user space daemons, so "top" isn't sufficient. ;)
>
>And is it possible that it could indeed be the HBA? I mean, there is often
>a TCP offloading engine on better NIC cards, and while looking at
>different HBA's, it seems like those have different offloading mechanisms
>as well. I've been looking mostly at Emulex cards, and they seem to differ
>quite a bit when it comes to architecture.
>
>For instance, if I have a 66MHz PCI bus, will a LP11002 still be faster
>than a LP9002DC? And yes, I include lower system CPU utilization per
>megabit of throughput in my definition of "faster".
>
>(http://www.emulex.com/products/fc/index.html)
>
>Would be good to hear other people's experience from this..
>
>//Oscar
>
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