The two machines I used for testing were an AMD X2 4200 and an Intel Q6600 quad core CPU on a p35 motherboard. The AMD machine uses the Nvidia CK804 Ethernet Controller (rev a3) with the forcedeth driver, while the Intel machine has a Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 12) driven by the sky2 driver.

The non-motherboard NICS are two Intel Pro/1000 PT gigabit PCIe NICs. Unless otherwise specified, I performed my tests with a DLink DGS-1008D gigabit switch between the two computers. Apart from the two machines being tested, the switch was not under additional load. I performed some Intel NIC tests without the switch; latency was about 10-20% better without the switch but bandwidth was similar.

I performed benchmarks using the lmbench (version 3.0-a9), fio (version 1.18) and bonnie++ (1.03) tools. lmbench provides many micro benchmarks; the most interesting for networks are bw_tcp, which measures network bandwidth, and the lat_tcp and lat_udp, which measure network latency for TCP and UDP communications respectively. I used fio and bonnie++ to measure performance when accessing a filesystem that is stored on a RAID-5 which is shared using NFS. I used fio mainly to see what difference the change of NICs makes to some typical filesystem access patterns on an NFS share.

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Courtsy : Ben Martin

Comments (2)

MullinsJackie said:

reply this post This is well known that money makes us free. But how to act when one has no money? The one way is to get the business loans and auto loan.

July 08, 2010 | url

Nishant Kashyap said:

... throughput for sequential read/write operations didn't improve much, but latency was much better, allowing anything that needs a network round trip, like create, delete, and seek, to work much faster. for which one ? onboard or the other

October 21, 2009

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