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Benchmarks for NICs?

Posted by Cliff on from the how-fast-do-these-things-go-again? dept.

SP99 asks: "Anyone out there read or published any good benchmark tests to compare NIC's and their performance with Linux? I hear stories of Intel and 3Com both dropping packets. Are there any authoritive sources that allow hype-free buying decisions? We all see comparisons for high profile items like CPU's, chipsets, video cards, etc...why not network cards?"

3 of 10 comments (clear)

  1. IIRC by Brazilian+Geek · · Score: 4

    Benchmarks on NICs aren't easy to do, especially ethernet - also known as cheap-as-dirt-net, also known as that's-why-we-love-it-net.

    The throughput is inversely proportional to the number of NICs on the line. The protocol used in the transactions also influences throughput - TCP/IP is a military grade protocol (no matter what buzzword people say, it was a military project) so it has massive redundancy, verification and overhead. Don't forget at in the packet itself - all the layers' overheads are large, for a simple HTTP packet, there's IP, TCP and the HTTP headers which take up bandwidith but aren't counted as throughput (at least to most people).

    In my experiances, DEC (tulip) and Intel (eepro100) chipsets run at about 90 Mbps on a Fast Ether and 8.5 Mbps on a simple Ether rigged on a switch linking only 2 machines (exact copies, both machines were bought at the same time from the same company) running Linux 2.2.11 with properly wired RJ45 connectors. I tried the same thing out using RTL 8092AS chipset and got a lower 80 Mbps (fast) and 8 Mbps (ether). The speed tests were run using "tar cf - | nc" and "nc -l | tar xf -" (not great but VERY fast) transfering "dd if=/dev/random bs=4k count=1M" (just for fun).

    Due to those tests that I ran and counting the pile of burned out cards that I have stacked in a corner at my office, I tend to side with the 'name brand' chipsets, especially DEC (Accton cards for example) since they are cheaper than the Intel chipset and are much better than the RTL chipsets - there are 9 burned out RTL Fastethernet NICs compared to 1 Intel and 0 (ZERO) DEC.

    I don't think that I helped that much and answered your question but benchmarks are though to run on NICs due to the great unknown of network deployment.

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  2. SMC EtherPower II by AlexA · · Score: 2

    Here's a nice review of the SMC EtherPowerII, Intel EtherExpress Pro, and 3Com Etherlink XL. According to the article, the SMC outperforms both the Intel and the 3Com card (Intel performs second-best). Pretty interesting since the SMC is actually cheaper than the Intel/3Com NICs.

  3. CPU Utilisation? by shippo · · Score: 2
    Benchmarks for almost every hardware device never seem to measure CPU utilisation when the tested hardware is being used.

    Some devices, either due to poor or obsolete design practices, or badly written drivers, consume large amounts of CPU time during utilisation, making the device almost useless in a CPU intensive environment.

    There's more to hardware than just the throughput.