11/22/23
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2 minutes read
Here is a short story about Intel E810-C card that was underperforming according to initial product specification that the card is capable of providing 200 Gbps of line rate speed.
Recently, one of our customers was in a hurry due to large and overwhelming DDoS attacks and asked us to test an Intel 810-C Ethernet NIC with 2x100Gbps, which he had already bought.
Since this card wasn't on our supported cards list for 100GE, we decided to give it a try and aid in preparing a protection plan as soon as possible.The server used Supermicro motherboard X12PW-TF/F and ran Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8380 CPU @ 2.30GHz with 40 CPU cores.
Specification of the Intel E810-C card (based on the product sheet) allowed the 200 Gbps bandwidth mark. Yet, the card underperformed under the load of more than 120 Gbps - topping out at that exact mark after a few days of tuning and trying different changes in the system and BIOS to allow for full PCIE 4.0 with x16 width to support higher speed.
Even changes in PCIE Burifcation didn't help at all.
Until we found a new document, "Intel Ethernet 800 Series Linux Performance Tuning Guide.pdf" stated that the internal switch of the card is 100 Gbps and is suited more for active/passive port operation instead of providing wire speed at full 200 Gbps.
So that explained why the card, even under DPDK, was topping out at 120Gb\s with more packet loss as the card was getting more than 140 Gbps of traffic.
