[Lxc-users] Benchmarking with LXC

[Gordon Henderson]

On Fri, 11 Jun 2010, Richard Thornton wrote:

>>> Gordon wrote:
>
>>> Are you sure it's wise to even consider LXC here?
>
>>> And can one PC really keep up with 20Gb/sec of Ethernet traffic? i.e. How
>>> do you know the bottleneck here won't be the PC rather than the firewall
>>> appliance... I'd seriously consider using 2 PCs - firstly back to back,
>>> then with the firewall in-between...
>
> Hi Gordon,
>
> Thanks for the info.
>
> Its a home project and I only have one 10G adapter and no 10G switch
> (I got a SMC 10G adapter from ebay for $250).

Expensive little toy :)

> The PC is an whitebox 6-core processor (AMD 1055T) with Ubuntu server
> on there (I was considering using OpenSolaris Zones), 10G card is
> detected.

Not convinced the number of cores will help you here - it'll be data over 
the PCIe bus and interrupt latency. Saying that, what do I know - I've no 
first-hand expeirence of 10Gb networking - yet! I really don't know if a 
PC can actually sustain 10Gb on it's own without having to wory about 
anything else...

> The firewall I want to test only supports 10Gbps maximum.
>
> I just want to figure out if it will work with LXC.

Personally, I'd probably see if I could do it without LXC - create 2 VLAN 
devices on the host and get netperf-server and netperf-client to bind to 
each Interface. If the client is looping data back then you'll only see 
half the line speed and both the server and client will br Txing at the 
same time...

No experience with netperf though - I've used iperf which can be bound to 
an interface/host - i'd be surprised if netperf couldn't.

Gordon