Issue 11
© Solarflare Communications 2014
79
Solarflare Server Adapter
User Guide
3.20 Performance Tuning on Linux
• Other Considerations...Page 94
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 chosen to
give good performance across a broad class of applications. In many cases, 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 guide is to highlight adapter driver settings that affect the performance metrics
described. This guide covers the tuning of all Solarflare adapters.
In addition to this guide, the user should consider other issues influencing performance such as
application settings, server motherboard chipset, 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.