Advantages of memory on 10Gbe nic?

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John M.

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Mar 7, 2016
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I recently picked up a mellanox connectx-2 card, the MNPA19-XTR.

The controller does not have any onboard memory but my previous Chelsio controller did have memory when I was using OSX.

Can anyone tell me what the advantages are of the onboard memory?

Cheers,
K.
 

John M.

Member
Mar 7, 2016
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Would this have an impact on performance using smb3 on windows?

For example, I'm doing intial testing copying large files from my ZFS server almost maxing out the pool speed at 650 MB/s. I'm doing a copy to the internal raid on the client which maxes out at 800 MB/s.

But I notice the network traffic is constantly fluctuating. Moving to 600-650 MB/s and then dropping all the way to 150 MB/s. The drop in speed seems to happen every time a file is finished, when an new one begins speeds ramp up again to the max.

I've tested the internal raid from the client an I think I narrowed the issue to the NIC.

Thanks!
K.

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i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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Would this have an impact on performance using smb3 on windows?
Probably only with small io, less with large sequential operations
But I notice the network traffic is constantly fluctuating. Moving to 600-650 MB/s and then dropping all the way to 150 MB/s. The drop in speed seems to happen every time a file is finished, when an new one begins speeds ramp up again to the max.
That's becuase the explorer uses one thread for transfers. Try a tool like robocopy with enough threads to get max smb3 throughput.
 
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