2003 server poor network performance

[Jeppedal]

Hi,

Sorry if this topic has been discussed earlier.

I have a bunch of different Proliant DL360/380 servers, from G3 and up with 2003 server SP2 installed and connected via Gb switch ports. It's almost impossible to get a higher throughput than about 550Mb/s when copying files and/or using traffic generators like iperf. It does not matter whether network teaming is enabled or not. I get a slightly higher rate when fixing the speed on the interface. All equipment is connected to Procurve 5400/2900 switches. Is this normal? Does anyone have any experience with tuning network performance?

Best regards
Jeppedal

 

[58sniper]

What's your AV doing?

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[itsp1965]

You said fixing speed on the interface... Can you verify that you are indeed running 100/1000Mbps Full-duplex on both the interface and your switch port because if one is set to auto/auto or auto/fixed you will get a lot of network errors caused by collisions.

 

[Jeppedal]

Hi, and thanks for the quick response!

I have tried with antivirus enabled, disabled and not installed. If I switch off real-time scanning the rate goes up a little. When it comes to the interfaces I have tried different combinations of auto/auto, auto/fixed and fixed/fixed. I can only rely on the configured parameters and the interface settings reported by the switches. All the error counters on the interfaces reports 0 in both ends. I created a 10GB file and copied it between different servers with different configurations. It starts off rather good, but the performance drops after a while. This might have somethings to do with the disk configuration. Iperf gives more stable results, but still not more than about 500Mb/s ... It also makes no difference whether the servers are connected to the same switch or not.

I tried to change the TcpAckFrequency parameter without any noticeable difference. All drivers and firmware is the latest revisions. How much throughput do You guys get?

Best regards
Jeppedal

 

[unclerico]

Take a look at this KB article by Intel, hopefully it can shed some light on your situation:

http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-025829.htm

I hate all Uppercase... I don't want my groups to seem angry at me all the time! =)
- ColdFlame (vbscript forum)

 

[xmsre]

Is that the broadcom NIC? If so, update the NIC driver to at least 4.x.

Is it intel or AMD CPU? There was an issue with AMD dual core opterons with timer drift. If you're using the AMD processors, you need to put the /usepmtimer swith in the boot.ini.