G'day,
I need help optimizing a server so it can maximize incoming network traffic (UDP) and
write the data to disks over a 100T network connection. My system works well with
no dropped packets until I turn on disk writes to the SATA disks. I have tried tuning
the network parameters but with marginal success.
Motherboard/CPU: Supermicro with dual 1000T interfaces, TG3 driver, 3.2G P4 (HT enabled)
Disks: dual 80G SATA disks
Network: TG3 driver
O/S: Fedora Core 4, 2.6.17-1.2142
Tuning options used:
via kernel: /proc/sys/net/core/rmem_max 2500000
/proc/sys/net/core/wmem_max 2500000
/proc/sys/net/core/netdev_max_backlog 20000
via ethtool, interrupt coalesce itmes:
rx-usec 100
rx-frames 20
via ethtool, RX ring size to max allowd by driver:
rx 511
Disk:
originally SW RAID, experienced lots of errors when write was enabled
changed to single partition, formatted with mke2fs -m 0 -b 4096, far fewer write errors
I am still getting groups of dropped packets when cron.daily or weekly runs and at random times.
The errors seem to be groups of missed packets and rarely a single packet. I did find a similar
problem that someone else reported and am wondering if this could be the same problem
(both are using Supermicro motherboards and the on-board TG3 driver):
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ide&m=115689223417994&w=2
Any ideas? Can I lower the priority of writes to disk? Are there serial options I can use? Are
there updates to the tg3 driver I could try (for example really large rx buffers beyond 511)?
Cheers,
--
Wade Hampton
