PE2950/RHEL5 and slow bonding!

[Jonathan Dill]

On Apr 23, 2008, at 11:40 AM, Brian McGrew wrote:

> Good morning all...
>
> I’ve got a 2950 with RHEL5 installed in a stock configuration.  I’ve  
> got dual on-board Broadcom cards so I’ve bonded eth0 and eth1 into  
> bond0 for better performance.  The problem is, that bonded interface  
> is slower than molasses in January!  It’s terrible.  I get about 4x  
> better performance if I just use a single 1GB eth0 connection.  What  
> the heck???
>
> Somebody please shed some light on this for me!!!   This is a data  
> server with about 2TB of files on it, I need all the performance I  
> can get.  I will say this however, for a short time I had Win2K3  
> Enterprise on here and sing the Broadcom tools I bonded (teamed) the  
> NICS and it was very, very fast.  I think I just missed something!?!?!

First off, please send txt and not HTML formatted messages to the  
mailing list.

Offhand, I'd say check your TOE settings and try enable / disable TOE  
on both cards and see if that makes any difference.  Maybe the  
Broadcom drivers have come a long way, but a couple years ago, I had  
problems with slow performance, interfaces going dead etc so ended up  
switching to Intel Pro for production with the thought to revisit at  
some point when I rebuild some server.

Maybe I am too conservative, but bonding in the kernel seems awfully  
new to me, probably would not use it for production unless there is  
not a more solid alternative available. I'd probably just receive  
traffic on one interface but let the kernel send it out on either  
interface, possibly fool with iproute2 as that is fairly solid and  
tested, or just have two different addresses and configure some  
clients to use one address and some clients to use the other.  It  
would be even better if each port goes to a different switch, and all  
the clients on that switch go to the interface that is connected to  
the same switch.  Otherwise, unless you are doing some trunking or  
have 10GBASE uplinks between switches, being able to put out 2 Gb/s is  
going to be a moot point anyway.



>
>
> My configuration is as follows, I’ll take all the advice I can get  
> here!
>
> 14_ uname -a
> Linux mvppvt125 2.6.18-8.el5 #1 SMP Fri Jan 26 14:15:14 EST 2007  
> x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
>
> 11_ more /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
> DEVICE=eth0
> ONBOOT=yes
> BOOTPROTO=none
> USERCTL=no
> MASTER=bond0
> SLAVE=yes
>
> 12_ more /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1
> DEVICE=eth1
> ONBOOT=yes
> BOOTPROTO=none
> USERCTL=no
> MASTER=bond0
> SLAVE=yes
>
> 13_ more /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0
> DEVICE=bond0
> IPADDR=10.0.0.125
> NETMASK=255.255.255.0
> NETWORK=10.0.0.0
> BROADCAST=10.0.0.255
> ONBOOT=yes
> BOOTPROTO=none
> USERCTL=no
>
> 2_ more /etc/modprobe.conf
> alias scsi_hostadapter megaraid_sas
> alias scsi_hostadapter1 usb-storage
> alias eth0 bnx2
> alias eth1 bnx2
> alias bond0 bonding
> options bonding miimon=100
>
> 3_ cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0
> Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.0.3 (March 23, 2006)
>
> Bonding Mode: load balancing (round-robin)
> MII Status: up
> MII Polling Interval (ms): 100
> Up Delay (ms): 0
> Down Delay (ms): 0
>
> Slave Interface: eth0
> MII Status: up
> Link Failure Count: 0
> Permanent HW addr: 00:1e:c9:28:a9:a9
>
> Slave Interface: eth1
> MII Status: up
> Link Failure Count: 0
> Permanent HW addr: 00:1e:c9:28:a9:ab
>
> 19_ -- ethtool bond0
> Settings for bond0:
> No data available
>
> 5_ -- ethtool eth0
> Settings for eth0:
>     Supported ports: [ TP ]
>     Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
>                             100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
>                             1000baseT/Full
>     Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
>     Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
>                             100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
>                             1000baseT/Full
>     Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
>     Speed: 1000Mb/s
>     Duplex: Full
>     Port: Twisted Pair
>     PHYAD: 1
>     Transceiver: internal
>     Auto-negotiation: on
>     Supports Wake-on: g
>     Wake-on: d
>     Link detected: yes
>
> 6_ -- ethtool eth1
> Settings for eth1:
>     Supported ports: [ TP ]
>     Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
>                             100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
>                             1000baseT/Full
>     Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
>     Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
>                             100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
>                             1000baseT/Full
>     Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
>     Speed: 1000Mb/s
>     Duplex: Full
>     Port: Twisted Pair
>     PHYAD: 1
>     Transceiver: internal
>     Auto-negotiation: on
>     Supports Wake-on: g
>     Wake-on: d
>     Link detected: yes
>
>
>
>
>
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