The blog Pure See takes a look at out-of-box performance of Intel Xeon 5500 processor series (Nehalem) on Sun servers running OpenSolaris 2009.06, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 and Solaris 10 Update 7 using a micro-benchmark tool uperf. The main purpose is to see if a system can achieve X Gbit/s or send/receive y packets/sec after the workload is characterized.

uperf is an open source, network performance tool that supports modelling and replay of various networking patterns. Developed by the Performance Applications Engineering group at Sun, uperf is freely available under the GNU General Public License Version 3.

The blog's author states that the Sun servers based on the Intel Xeon 5000 processors have sufficient cpu cycles and I/O bandwidth to drive one 10GbE port at line rate for large packet sizes. To fairly compare the operating systems, a four port configuration was chosen to show difference in throughput. "When PCIe gen. 2 10 Gigabit Ethernet is widely available, the four ports can come from two NIC and take only two PCIe slots," notes the blog. "Since I use PCIe gen. 1 10 Gigabit Ethernet, the four ports come from four NIC to avoid PCIe bandwidth becoming the bottleneck."

The test results are displayed in two charts showing TCP transmit throughput and TCP receive throughput - both 64 KB msg. OpenSolaris and SUSE 11 are neck-in-neck in the first test results for TCP transmit throughput. In TCP receive throughput, OpenSolaris clearly demonstrates its performance leadership. Solaris 10 Update 7 has a significant drop in throughput as connections increase, and the author explains that this is due to a high rate of interrupts. Offered is a tuning script to interrupt more cpu and improve performance to mimic the OpenSolaris results.

uperf profiles and the test set-up for this experiment are posted along with another tuning script for Solaris clients.

More Information

Out of box Network Performance on Nehalem servers - Pure See blog entry

uperf [...read more...]

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