PCI-Express Motherboards: Apple Xserve

Motherboard performance with Myri-10G "Gen1" (2.5 GT/s) NICs
Apple Xserve

Motherboard:	Apple Xserve
CPU Type:	Xeon
Number of CPUs:	4
CPU Speed (GHz)	2.00
Chipset:	Intel 5000X (Greencreek)
Interrupt Type:	MSI
Write Combining:	Enabled
Mac OS X Kernel:	10.4.8 Server
Myri10GE Driver version:	1.0.0

*Test results using Myri-10G "Gen1" (2.5 GT/s) NICs without a switch*
Hardware Write Speed (Gb/s)	12.888
Hardware Read Speed (Gb/s)	11.504
Hardware Read/Write (Bidirectional) Speed (Gb/s)	21.224
Netperf TCP STREAM, MTU 8244 (Mb/s)	8039.00
Netperf TCP SENDFILE, MTU 8244 (Mb/s)	N/A
Netperf UDP STREAM, MTU 8244 (Mb/s)	5600.24
Netperf TCP STREAM, MTU 1500 (Mb/s)	1659.15
Netperf TCP SENDFILE, MTU 1500 (Mb/s)	N/A
Netperf UDP STREAM, MTU 1500 (Mb/s)	1468.03

Notes:

An MTU of 8244 bytes was used instead of the normal jumbo frame MTU setting of 9000 bytes because it yields better results. Socket buffer space was increased as recommended in the Performance Tuning section of the Mac OS X Myri10GE README. The default interrupt coalescing setting of 75 was used.

Mac OS X does not support TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO), and Large Receive Offload (LRO) is not yet supported by the Mac OS X driver.

TCP_SENDFILE results are not shown because Mac OS X does not have a sendfile system call in Mac OS X 10.4.x.

Last updated: 16 January 2007