*BSD News Article 61180


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From: root@dyson.iquest.net (John S. Dyson)
Subject: Re: Glaring anomaly in lmbench results: socket bandwidth using localhost = 0.21 MB/s
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References: <4fkus7$kab@stork.runit.sintef.no> <4fl75p$rlv@nntp5.u.washington.edu>
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 1996 14:34:40 GMT
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In article <4fl75p$rlv@nntp5.u.washington.edu>,
Craig Johnston <caj@tower.stc.housing.washington.edu> wrote:
>Yes.  I got about the same result.  I actually got as low as .17 MB/s on
>486 dx4-100 testing socket bandwidth using localhost.
>
>Machine is otherwise a good performer.  What gives?  
>
Actually, it is a good performer.  The effect that you are seeing is due
to an unfortunate clash between the size of the loopback mtu, some new
tcp code and an option set in the lmbench code.  The problem is that it
hasn't been clearly determined what to do about it.  Larry McVoy has
authorized a very minor mod to lmbench.  I think that is okay, but to
get an actual idea of the loopback performance without changing the
benchmark (loopback is what is being measured -- not TCP performance
with a network adapter), you might want to change the def for LOMTU
in /sys/net/if_loop.c from 16K to 4K.  You'll see nicer (and more
accurate reflection of the perf) numbers.

John Dyson
dyson@freebsd.org