Yes, it seems the Cassini interface can do 900+ Mbits/sec but that Sun
recommends 3to4 UltraSparc III's per NIC.  We can't use Jumbo frames either.

I heard Solaris 9 and, of course Solaris 10 make some strides in Network
performance.  Still, I'd love to hear if anyone is maxing out 2 or more
and what Sun hardware they use to do it??   Do the UltraSparc IV's help
in any way here?? ie...2 ce worker threads per CPU ??   Of course PCI
bus bandwidth becomes an issue as well...

Robert Maiello
Pioneer Data Systems

On Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:26:48 +0200, Oscar Olsson <spam1 AT QBRANCH DOT SE> 
wrote:

>On Thu, 23 Jun 2005, Eric Wagar wrote:
>
>EW> Depending on the version of NetWorker will depend on how many parallel save
>EW> streams you can run.  For us, we have the Network edition, so we get 64.
>EW> With a library with 10 drives, we use all 64 streams on a save.  We, like
>EW> others, can only use one stream on a tape based recover.
>
>What server do you have that can manage that? What aggregated throughput
>speed to you get?
>
>We have a Sun V440, with 4 1281MHz Ultrasparc IIIi CPUs with 1MB cache,
>and that server can handle just about 1gbit of throughput, before the
>kernel just can't get more CPU time. We're using the built-in ce (Cassini)
>NICs. It seems like the excessive CPU useage is caused by network
>processing. We can't use jumbo frames, since some network equimpent, that
>the clients are attached to doesn't support it.
>
>To me, the excessive amount of CPU used to produce 1gbit of network
>throughput seems just plain wrong, since I seem to remember that the ce
>chipset has TCP checksum acceleration? Or are there any faster NICs in
>this regard, how about the bge chipset? Or would a better CPU (same
>speed, but larger cache, and yes I know I need to get a new server
>then :) ) with a larger cache do the trick, since we see a lot of context
>switching going on?
>
>The funny thing is that if I stream data to the drives alone, without
>reading the data from the network, it takes very little kernel CPU.
>
>//Oscar
>
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