"Slow" GigE, switching to Intel card will solve?

[arthurleung]

Since I got a Dell PC2616 switch I can't run jumbo frame on my network. I iSCSI-ed all HDDs to another machine on a network (Both sides with 4xRAID0 running), but due to the slow and flawed NF4, I could only reach a peak speed of 70MBytes/sec with about 85~90% CPU usage by NF4 LoM on the slower machine.

I'm wondering if buying an Intel Pro/1000PT desktop card will help? No one do NIC review on the net, and I don't want to buy the card then to find out it won't improve my network performance / reduce CPU load.

Many thanks,
Arthur

[Agent]

Could you tell us a bit more about your setup ?
These NF4 boards ? which ones are they ?

[brak]

Here are some quick stats. Dual Opteron 246 (2Ghz, 1MB cache), 64 Bit SUSE

1) From an Intel Pro 1000MT dual port GigE adapter to another.

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.10 GBytes 941 Mbits/sec

real 0m10.005s
user 0m0.035s
sys 0m0.644s

I never saw iperf on the sending machine use more than 7% of the CPU. On the receiving system, cpu utilization was around 23%.

Second tests...

Client system now Athlon64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ (2Ghz, 512MB cache). With Nvidia Nforce ethernet on motherboard.

[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 902 MBytes 757 Mbits/sec

real 0m10.017s
user 0m0.012s
sys 0m7.904s

1) As a client sending to a box with the intel adapter, it consumed 75-80% of one of the cores.

Now look at the receiving side of the pic.

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.03 GBytes 887 Mbits/sec

And one of the two 3800+ cores was completely pegged.

I haven't tried the nvidia proprietary drivers, but there you have it... and your mileage with windows will vary.

[kalniel]

I think the general rule is having a dedicated NIC will improve CPU utilization and speed over an onboard one. But I don't know the facts regarding NForce 4 ethernet.