Re: Early SPECWeb99 results on 2.5.33 with TSO on e1000

"Martin J. Bligh" [off-list ref] writes:

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Ie. the headers that don't need to go across the bus are the critical
resource saved by TSO.

I'm not sure that's entirely true in this case - the Netfinity
8500R is slightly unusual in that it has 3 or 4 PCI buses, and
there's 4 - 8 gigabit ethernet cards in this beast spread around
different buses (Troy - are we still just using 4? ... and what's
the raw bandwidth of data we're pushing? ... it's not huge). 

I think we're CPU limited (there's no idle time on this machine), 
which is odd for an 8 CPU 900MHz P3 Xeon,

Quite possibly.  The P3 has roughly an 800MB/s FSB bandwidth, that must
be used for both I/O and memory accesses.  So just driving a gige card at
wire speed takes a considerable portion of the cpus capacity.  

On analyzing this kind of thing I usually find it quite helpful to
compute what the hardware can theoretically to get a feel where the
bottlenecks should be.

We can push about 420MB/s of IO out of this thing (out of that 
theoretical 800Mb/s). 

Sounds about average for a P3.  I have pushed the full 800MiB/s out of
a P3 processor to memory but it was a very optimized loop.  Is
that 420MB/sec of IO on this test?
 

Specweb is only pushing about 120MB/s of
total data through it, so it's not bus limited in this case.

Note quite.  But you suck at least 240MB/s of your memory bandwidth with
DMA from disk, and then DMA to the nic.  Unless there is a highly
cached component.  So I doubt you can effectively use more than 1 gige
card, maybe 2.  And you have 8?

Of course, I should have given you that data to start with, 
but ... ;-)

PS. This thing actually has 3 system buses, 1 for each of the two
sets of 4 CPUs, and 1 for all the PCI buses, and the three buses
are joined by an interconnect in the middle. But all the IO goes
through 1 of those buses, so for the purposes of this discussion,
it makes no difference whatsoever ;-)

Wow the hardware designers really believed in over-subscription.
If the busses are just running 64bit/33Mhz you are oversubscribed.
And at 64bit/66Mhz the pci busses can easily swamp the system 
533*4 ~= 2128MB/s. 

What kind of memory bandwidth does the system have, and on which
bus are the memory controllers?  I'm just curious  

Eric