Niels Kristian Jensen
2004-Nov-27 09:48 UTC
Performance problems on Intel E100 (Shawn Wright)
>From: "Shawn Wright" <swright@sls.bc.ca> >Subject: [Shorewall-users] Finally making some progress>I *think* we are finally making some progress in tracking our elusive >performance problems. After employing a second 10Mb link from our ISP, >along with another firewall box and proxy, we were able to determine the >problem *is* our firewall. We don''t know exactly why yet, but our sporadic >slow web access seems to have gone away since swapping a new firewall >in this morning.>The original firewall is a PPro200 with 256Mb, an Intel E100I''ve had much trouble with Intel E100 NIC''s. The problem can be fixed using the e100 driver instead of the eepro100 driver. When I first saw the problem, I could avoid it by passing the network signal via an old 10Mbit/s hub - the driver seems to miss interrupts when running in 100 MBit/s full duplex mode and then fall back to polling which is very slow. More info can be found here: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linux-kernel/2002-07/0274.html Best regards, Niels Kristian Jensen Denmark
On 27 Nov 2004 at 10:48, Niels Kristian Jensen wrote:> >From: "Shawn Wright" <swright@sls.bc.ca> > >Subject: [Shorewall-users] Finally making some progress > > >I *think* we are finally making some progress in tracking our elusive > >performance problems. After employing a second 10Mb link from our ISP, > >along with another firewall box and proxy, we were able to determine the > >problem *is* our firewall. We don''t know exactly why yet, but our sporadic > >slow web access seems to have gone away since swapping a new firewall > >in this morning. > > >The original firewall is a PPro200 with 256Mb, an Intel E100 > > I''ve had much trouble with Intel E100 NIC''s. The problem can be fixed using the e100 driver instead of the eepro100 driver. > > When I first saw the problem, I could avoid it by passing the network signal via an old 10Mbit/s hub - the driver seems to miss interrupts when running in 100 MBit/s full duplex mode and then fall back to polling which is very slow. > > More info can be found here: > > http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linux-kernel/2002-07/0274.htmlStrangely enough, the current firewall is using the eepro100 driver and doing well. I had tried both e100 and eepro100 on the old one with similar results. Thanks for the info - I will add this to my list of things to check out. The current box is doing well, but is still temporary. For the first time in 2 weeks we are now seeing 5 minute averages at over 95% of our 10Mb line. I''d like to know what our peak ip_conntrack values are during these times - does anyone have a trick for doing this already made up? I thought of grep''ing /proc/slabinfo every 60 seconds or so to a file, but maybe there is a better way? The highest value I''ve seen is ~3000, but usage was only around 25% at that time. -- Shawn Wright I.T. Manager Shawnigan Lake School