Re: Fireperf: first tests an results

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

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Hello Daniel,

Thank you very much for testing fireperf and publishing your results. I hope we can collect many more.

> On 9 Feb 2021, at 12:53, daniel.weismueller(a)ipfire.org wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi guys,
> 
> today I installed fireperf on my testing IPFire and my Ubuntu PC.
> 
> server: IPFire Core 154; Intel i7 4790; Intel 82571EB/GB 1GBit Nic
> Client: Ubuntu 20.4; Intel i7 9700; Intel i219-V 1GBit Nic
> 
> Michael and I agreed that one more port should be opened per 5000 expected connection per second (cps)

So far, that is the theory. The rationale behind this is that any connection that is opened by a user space program on Linux has a source port between usually 32768 and 60999:

[root(a)fw01 ~]# sysctl net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 32768	60999

That leaves you with being able to open up to 28231 connections to the same server on the same port. Obviously this is not enough for more than 28k connections and therefore it is necessary to open more listening sockets on the server side. Each will give you another 28231 connections.

However, my system got slower and slower with each connection that was opened - presumably because it takes some time to find a free source port. Therefore I would recommend to open more ports on the server side than strictly necessary.

I have not empirically tested this yet, but about 5000 connections per port intuitively sounds like a good value.

> 
> So here my results:
> 
> 
> Server:
> fireperf -s -P 10000 -p 63000:630010
> 
> Client:
> fireperf -c <IP address> -P 1 -x -p 63000:63010 -> ~5000 cps
> 
> fireperf -c <IP address> -P 10 -x -p 63000:63010 -> ~30000-35000 cps
> 
> fireperf -c <IP address> -P 100 -x -p 63000:63010 -> ~35000-40000 cps
> 
> fireperf -c <IP address> -P 1000 -x -p 63000:63010 -> ~40000-45000 cps
> 
> fireperf -c <IP address> -P 10000 -x -p 63000:63010 -> ~46000-48000 cps
> 
> The cpu utilization was limited to one core and increased in sync with the cps on both sides.
> 
> In my last test, the utilization was about 85-100% on the server and 75-95% on the client.
> 
> In the next days I will test our mini and post the results here.

Yes, I would like to see more performance benchmarks with the LWL appliance range. I have tested them with a couple of pre-releases of fireperf, but they were all in different environments and it would be good to test them all under reproducible conditions.

I would also like to see this tested on weaker hardware. Hopefully we will see any bottlenecks earlier than on 10G sixteen core 19” rack-mountable enterprise system. :) Anyone up for that?

Best,
-Michael

> -
> 
> Daniel
>