[dpdk-users] [ICE DPDK 20.11] Packet drops under low offered load & Not able to achieve line rate

[Yan Lei <l.yan@epfl.ch>]

Hi,


I am experimenting with the new Intel E810 100G NICs. I'm trying to reproduce the performance results here https://fast.dpdk.org/doc/perf/DPDK_20_11_Intel_NIC_performance_report.pdf (test #5). But I kept seeing packet drops (loss ratio ranging from 10^-7 to 10^-5) when the offered load is above 50Gbps regardless of packet size, which is not the case in the performance report.


Another issue is that the DUT (using l3fwd/testpmd) can only achieve 95% of the line rate even with high core counts and large packets (1518B).


I used the same settings as in the performance report except for the following difference:


CPU: E5 2697 v3 @2.6GHz

RAM: 256GB 1866MHz (4 channels)

OS: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Kernel 4.15.0-generic

Traffic generator: MoonGen with two Mellanox ConnectX-5 EN 100G NICs

DDP: ice_comms-1.3.22.0.pkg


The DUT with 4 cores can already handle ~70Gbps offered load with 10^-5 loss when using 64B packets, which is close to the theoretical packet rate upper-bound of the NIC, so I am sure the CPU is not the bottleneck.


Am I missing any setups for the NIC? I understand the NIC is fairly new, so it would be nice if you could forward this to someone who is familiar with it? Maybe someone from the Intel DPDK Validation team?


Many thanks,

Lei