Currently I'm running CentOS 4.4 on a Dell Poweredge 850 with an Intel Pro/1000 Quad-port adapter.
I seem to be able to only achieve 80% utilization on the adapter, while on the same box running Fedora Core 5 I was able to reach 99% utilization.
I am using iSCSI Enterprise Target as my application and I am using the nullio feature, it just discards any write and sends back random data for any read, for my bandwidth test. The IO pattern I use is 1MB block sequentials.
Is there something in the OS that is throttling the bandwidth as it seems to be capped at 80%.
I have selinux and iptables disabled, and I have tuned the TCP/IP stack to mimic the settings under 2.6.17, except bumped up the default IP send/receiver buffer size for improved UDP transmission over 1Gbps.
The CPU is a P4 Dual Core 3GHz, not top of the line but adequate for my needs (strictly block io).
Here are the TCP/IP tunables from my sysctl.conf:
# Controls default receive buffer size (bytes) net.core.rmem_default = 262144
# Controls IP default send buffer size (bytes) net.core.wmem_default = 262144
# Controls IP maximum receive buffer size (bytes) net.core.rmem_max = 262144
# Controls IP maximum send buffer size (bytes) net.core.wmem_max = 262144
# Controls TCP memory utilization (pages) net.ipv4.tcp_mem = 49152 65536 98304
# Controls TCP sliding receive window buffer (bytes) net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 16777216
# Controls TCP sliding send window buffer (bytes) net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 65536 16777216
Ross S. W. Walker Information Systems Manager Medallion Financial, Corp. 437 Madison Avenue 38th Floor New York, NY 10022 Tel: (212) 328-2165 Fax: (212) 328-2125 WWW: http://www.medallion.com http://www.medallion.com
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