WARNING - OLD ARCHIVES

This is an archived copy of the Xen.org mailing list, which we have preserved to ensure that existing links to archives are not broken. The live archive, which contains the latest emails, can be found at http://lists.xen.org/
   
 
 
Xen 
 
Home Products Support Community News
 
   
 

xen-users

RE: [Xen-users] Shared Storage

> 
> > TCP offload helps a lot in the case of iSCSI. You get the ability to
> > send ~60KB of data at once, and your packets are checksummed for
free. I
> > don't actually know what Linux support for RSS is like but if it is
any
> > good you also get automatic distribution of rx workload across
multiple
> > CPU's too, but that only works if you have multiple TCP connections
in
> > flight at once (eg the multiple LUN scenario).
> >
> > I don't know what iSCSI offload involves... maybe that can help
further.
> 
> Offload is great, but it's still TCP.  The protocol itself is heavy on
> overhead so your 1gbit pipe ends up being, you know, .8gbit storage
and
> .2gbit protocol (I don't know what the exact numbers are).  Offload
> keeps this away from your CPUs but doesn't do anything on the pipe
> itself.  iSCSI's great when you can't afford FC or FCoE (which still
> isn't as good as FC) or when you need to do things over a WAN, but it
> has its cost.
> 

For your numbers to make any sense at all, that would be 1800 bytes of
header for a 9000 byte packet. That doesn't seem even remotely right.
Even 180 bytes of header (0.02) seems a bit excessive in terms of raw
numbers, while still being pretty efficient in terms of ratio (0.98)

James


_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>