Issue 11
© Solarflare Communications 2014
221
Solarflare Server Adapter
User Guide
4.27 Performance Tuning on Windows
• Other Considerations...Page 226
Introduction
The Solarflare family of network adapters are designed for high-performance network applications.
The adapter driver is pre-configured with default performance settings that have been designed to
give good performance across a broad class of applications. Occasionally, application performance
can be improved by tuning these settings to best suit the application.
There are three metrics that should be considered when tuning an adapter:
• Throughput
• Latency
• CPU utilization
Different applications may be more or less affected by improvements in these three metrics. For
example, transactional (request-response) network applications can be very sensitive to latency
whereas bulk data transfer applications are likely to be more dependent on throughput.
The purpose of this section is to highlight adapter driver settings that affect the performance metrics
described. This guide covers the tuning of all Solarflare adapters.
Latency will be affected by the type of physical medium used: 10GBase-T, twinaxial (direct-attach),
fiber or KX4. This is because the physical media interface chip (PHY) used on the adapter can
introduce additional latency.
This section is designed for performance tuning Solarflare adapters on Microsoft Windows. This
should be read in conjunction with the reference design board errata documents and the following
Microsoft performance tuning guides:
• Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 R2
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg463392.aspx
• Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2012
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn529133.
In addition, you may need to consider other issues influencing performance, such as application
settings, server motherboard chipset, CPU speed, Cache size, RAM size, additional software installed
on the system, such as a firewall, and the specification and configuration of the LAN. Consideration
of such issues is not within the scope of this guide.