Solarflare
Server
Adapter
User
Guide
Solarflare
Adapters
on
Linux
Issue
20
©
Solarflare
Communications
2017
103
3.24
Performance
Tuning
on
Linux
•
•
•
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
section
covers
the
tuning
of
all
Solarflare
adapters.
‐
r
,
‐‐
report
Display
an
adapter
serial
number
and
current
license
status
(see
example
above).
Use
with
‐‐
all
or
with
‐‐
adapter
.
If
an
installed
or
active
key
is
reported
as
‘An’
(where
n
is
a
number),
it
indicates
a
license
unknown
to
this
version
of
sfkey
‐
use
an
updated
sfkey
version.
‐
s
,
‐‐
silent
Silent
mode,
output
errors
only.
‐
v
,
‐‐
verbose
Verbose
mode.
‐
V
,
‐‐
version
Display
sfkey
version
and
exit.
‐
x
,
‐‐
xml
Report
formated
as
XML.
Table
22:
sfkey
options
Option
Description