On 2012-08-05, Kapeatanakis Giannis <[email protected]> wrote: > On 05/08/12 00:13, Mike Belopuhov wrote: >> to elaborate on this point a bit: please make sure you understand what >> you're testing! tcpbench and iperf both test how fast your tcp or udp >> server running in userland can receive and transmit information >> through the socket interface. this has nothing to do with router >> workloads for example. >>> Yes, we would like to be faster but to get more speed large changes are >>> needed since currently only one CPU is doing all the work in the kernel. >>> >>> -- >>> :wq Claudio > > Well if the OpenBSD is in the middle of two other machines like B in A-B-C > and you do iperf/tcpbench between A and C then it is a valid test for > router workloads, isn't it?
Well it's a valid test if you're interested in seeing how it performs when routing a single or limited number of flows but it's not valid for standard internet traffic forwarding. "normal" internet traffic has lots of separate flows, lots of destinations and a mixture of packet sizes. And "normal" is, of course, different depending on the network. Neither iperf/tcpbench are good for emulating this. People pay tens of thousands of (insert favourite currency unit here) for test equipment for this.. Can't remember if it came up in this thread yet or not, but make sure that pool_debug is off if you're doing performance testing.
