Polling considered bad? Polling vs Not Polling IPsec benchmark (ALIX/Hifn/1.2.3)
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I just upgraded one of my old soekris 48xx boxes to a new ALIX board, 1.2.3 release and moved the 1411 Hifn card over. I'm seeing some interesting benchmark results.
Using 3DES with polling ON I get about 15Mbit/s and ~40% cpu use but with polling OFF I get 25Mbit/s and 90% cpu use.
Messing with the kern.polling.* setting doesn't make any difference.
For completeness the other end is a Xeon box running 1.2.2 and the net in between is comcast capped at a notional 30Mbit/sec. Non-vpn connections top out at 33 Mbit/sec with no problem polling OFF and top out at 29Mbit/sec with polling ON.
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Personally, I've not seen polling ever help on an ALIX. I haven't tried a Hifn card though.
I think cmb said he was able to get >30Mbit of IPsec on ALIX with 3DES (and DES, AES, and AES 256)
I don't think he had polling enabled when he did the tests, but I'm not 100% sure on that.
