Re: Supermicro X5DL8-GG (ServerWorks Grandchampion LE chipset) slow

[Song Zhao <song.zhao@nuix.com.au>]

To: Manish Lachwani <manish@Zambeel.com>

On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 12:54 pm, you wrote:
> WHat kind of benchmarks are you running? I had evaluated a Supermicro board
> with e7500 chipset and it showed good performance. Are you benchmarking
> network, memory, disk? Note that 3ware controllers operate at 33 MHZ PCI
> and if the nics share the same PCI bus with 3ware, they too will operate at
> 33 MHZ PCI and not 133 MHZ. Have you disabled hyperthreading in the BIOS?

I did some disk I/O and CPU benchmarks, including bonnie++, hdparm, nbench,
unixbench, dbench, tiotest. I haven't done any network/memory testing yet,
the onboard Broadcom and Intel gigabit controllers both seem to work quite
well. I have taken care to make sure that the 3ware card has its own PCI bus,
in this case slot 5. I have not disabled hyperthreading but I am not sure why
I would.

On that note, I have also done benchmarking with a Supermicro E7500 board
(P4DPR, Intel Gigabit 82544GC onboard controller), the tests I ran included
Netperf, Netperf3, NetPIPE (TCP), Tbench, nttcp, Aim9 and the ones I
mentioned above. It seemed that if I had two identical machines hooked up
directly (back to back with CAT5E crossover cable), the performance would be
a lot better and is very consistent. I tried different combinations
HT=on/off, CPU affinity, IRQ affinity, SMP/UP. Some results were:

Supermicro
=========
Netperf Result (MB/s) - 112.21
Netperf3 Result (MB/s) - 112.22
Tbench Result (MB/s) - 114.48
Nttcp Result (Mb/s) - 946.55

However, if I hook it up to a different machine, problems started to occur.
For example, with the Tyan S2720 Thunder i7500  board (E7500 chipset, Intel
82544EI onboard gigabit controller), I see good performance on the Tyan but
not Supermicro.

Supermicro
=========
Netperf Result (MB/s) - 29.23
Netperf3 Result (MB/s) - 78.19
Tbench Result (MB/s) - 117.32
Nttcp Result (Mb/s) - 646.77

Tyan
====
Netperf Result (MB/s) - 112.22
Netperf3 Result (MB/s) - 112.02
Tbench Result (MB/s) - can't find it
Nttcp Result (Mb/s) - 945.9

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