August 8, 201114 yr Author I am going to try out the tower when I get home and see how it working with TSO disabled.
August 8, 201114 yr Author Did you try disabling TSO from a couple messages ago? At first glance it looks like disabling TSO has made a huge improvement. What does disabling TSO do?
August 9, 201114 yr Still working? Keep an eye on it. Don't be surprised to see your cpu utilization increase with big transfers. TSO is one of several offloading methods used to reduce cpu overhead/participation in Ethernet transfers by giving simple work to the nic. The purpose is to improve efficiency and performance, but the added driver-to-nic complexity can add or expose problems. Disabling TSO means the cpu and driver handle TCP segmentation work. This will increase cpu load and bus transactions but simplify the process. Gets an extra cook out of the kitchen.
August 11, 201114 yr Author With TSO disabled the drive has been very quick. I run a Sempron 140 chip. Do you think it would be worthwhile to upgrade it to a dual-core chip? Thank you for this.
August 11, 201114 yr A dual-core chip will not make the file service any faster and will use more power. A dual-core chip is only used if you have processor intensive add-ons, e.g., video transcoding.
August 11, 201114 yr When I said the cpu load would increase I meant marginally. Shouldn't be anything you'll notice without looking for it, given that processor and a single Gb nic. Multiple cores can actually mess with network performance. If your board or OS get it wrong they may split the Ethernet interrupt across cores making for inefficient TCP/IP. You can set IRQ affinity to correct for it but then you may be fighting other interrupt clients that could benefit from multiple cores. Echoing dgaschk, unless you need big processing on the server...
August 11, 201114 yr Author OK I will stick with the Sempron 140 Access has been great now to all drives on Tower3. I really appreciate you sticking with me on this
August 11, 201114 yr Not a problem. I'm happy we got it working better. We have to be able to make that card work. Still too much magic for my taste; not knowing how TSO caused the problem. But for now bigger fish to fry.
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