On Friday 18 February 2005 12:06 pm, Helge Preuss wrote:
Hi all,
General questions: Is it possible to improve the server's network performance by adding a second GBit ethernet card? I think a PCI card is bound by the PCI bus performance. Would a second card, if PCI, even enhance performance noticeably? If I upgrade to PCIe, or use a mainboard with onboard GBit ethernet, would that change anything? Depends on server architecture. If it has more than one PCI bus and the NICs are on different busses you'll get better performance depending on what else is hanging off those PCI busses (video, USB, etc). PCIx will give you better
<snip> throughput. If both NICs are on the same PCI bus then performance will improve but not a ton, maybe 125% to 150% but never 200% of a single card. Mainboard NIC(s) are on a PCI bus so you need to know if the PCI slots are also on the same bus as the mainboard NIC(s).
So far, I was thinking in terms of using different subnets hanging on different ethernet ports on the server. Provided that both GBit cards have full performance, if clients on different subnets both wold get the full performance of a GBit card. Am I right? Yes depending on system load and what else is on the PCI busses. Single GBit NIC will probably saturate a PCI bus with your users unless they take turns
Now the SuSE question. The solution with two separate subnets is, of course, somewhat suboptimal. Does SuSE Linux provide a way to use a sort of channel bundling, so that the full network can benefit on the advantages of having two network adapters on the server? How would I do that? Just talked about on this list this week... Google 'ethernet channel bonding' and there is a lot of info. Can be done at the NIC end or in combination with intelligent switches.
Thanks,
Helge
Stan