It is good to know about se support !
   I think I may now review my plans for SunTrunkng. I did not consider
it because of the limited choice of the NICs it used to support.
   Thanks for the info !
   As for the mentioned 3d party solutions, I sent you another mail.
Even though I don't affiliate with that company I hate to "spam" mailing
lists...


Darren Dunham wrote:

Now to the next question. Why does the network I/O create such a high CPU
utilization? Is it because the ce adapters lack hardware acceleration
features, or is it because the Solaris 9 IP-stack isn't very fast?

You have mentioned you run Sun Trunking. IIRC that software can only run
on old Sun GEM gigabit cards (driver ge).

More recent versions of SunTrunking have supported ce devices for some
time now.

Those cards produce a lot of interrupts so they are not very efficient
in terms of CPU consumption.
You'd better of with newer chipsets, but not sure if Sun Trunking now
supports them.
In any case I know there are other 3d party alternatives to Sun Trunking
that work with many (if not all) NICs.

Do you have any examples?  I'd love to know about them.

IPMP can do some of what SunTrunking does, but not all of it.  It's
especially poor for a backup server which would like to aggregate lots
of incoming traffic from a small number of clients.

--
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham AT taos DOT com
Senior Technical Consultant         TAOS            http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
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