On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 11:20 +0800, Marvin Pascual wrote:
> How do you test a NIC before you deploy your server to production use?
> Or, is there any tool you use to test the stability of your NIC or its
> driver?
I've not had to do this marvs. what was the particular problem with
the NIC? with respect to testing, if I needed to do that, I'd probably
just setup some sort of random stress test pumping as much data through
the link as possible. i wouldn't use any heavyweight servers as the
generators for the data to pump (e.g., no apache or php, although
apache serving very large files would be fine). so,
a few concurrent scp's (no encryption) (huge files),
a few concurrent huge NFS copies (although adding NFS
to the mix might confound the data, since the
problems found might be in NFS rather than in the
NIC),
a few would be perhaps 20-50. I would think that 100 or so concurrent
large file copies would stress the NIC enough to make any bugs show
themselves. you might add a few processes that pump a lot of UDP
traffic through the link (e.g., openvpn in UDP mode, and then do 20-30
scp's over that). although you might not need to do this if your
NFS is already UDP.
you might replace the huge NFS copies with netcat, so that the
application layer would be simpler. in fact, you could replace
the concurrent scps with netcat too, maybe just to /dev/null,
so that there'd be no disk activity on the receiving end. you
might even try to have the source be /dev/zero, but i wouldn't
do that since some bugs might be triggered by particular patterns
in the data, and /dev/zero gives you only zeroes, and i don't like
grabbing gigabytes of data from /dev/random (can't test performance
of /dev/random versus reading a gig of data from the disk though
since my CPU and disk are pegged by some other processes right
now).
but again, that's just what i'd try. i've not actually had to do
this before. hehehe, since the above was me thinking with my
fingers, in conclusion what I'd probably end up doing would be
to pump a lot of data through the NIC (in both directions,
so use two computers) using netcat in both UDP and TCP modes.
tiger
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