[geeks] Well, THAT was a setback

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Sunday 17 January 2010, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> On 01/17/10 18:29, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> > On Sunday 17 January 2010, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> >> I've heard people talk about the Linux TCP stack falling down
> >> under heavy load, but never had it happen to me.  Until today.
> >
> > What hardware, and what distro/kernel?
> 
> Linux babylon5 2.6.32-gentoo-r1 #9 Sat Jan 16 13:49:53 EST 2010 i686
>  AMD Athlon(TM) XP 2400+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
> 
> Asus A7V333 motherboard, 3Com 3C905B PCI Ethernet at present.

100 Mbps ethernet? Really?  I haven't touched a 3C905x in many years...

If you're going to try to push enough data to stream to an LTO (any 
generation) tape drive, I'd strongly recommend GbE between the client 
and server.  If you're caching to a disk first, then I guess 100Mbps may 
be reasonable.

You said that you have an EEPro 100 in another thread... I'd try that, 
or an E1000 or similar (the desktop adapters are really cheap, and will 
still be much faster than your 3c905 even though they won't quite reach 
1Gb) before you assume that Linux was the problem.  I guarantee that the 
Linux TCP stack can handle >100Mbps just fine.  We've been doing GbE 
compute clusters at work for a while, and have started doing 10GbE 
clusters last year, all on Debian and RHEL, and we don't see problems 
that aren't related to a driver/card/cable/network issue.

Pat
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