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by SEJeff 3453 days ago
Out of kernel offloads (dpdk, solarflare's openonload, and mellanox's VMA) are good for two primary use cases:

* Reducing context switches at exceptionally high packet rates * Massively reducing latency with tricks like busy polling (which the kernel's native stack is gaining)

LVS is pretty much the undisputed king for serious business load balancing. I've heard (anecdotally) that Uber uses gorb[1] and google has released seesaw, which are both fancy wrappers ontop of LVS for load balancing.

Source: Almost 10 years optimizing Linux and hardware for low latency in a trading firm.

[1] https://github.com/kobolog/gorb

[2] https://github.com/google/seesaw
1 comments
bogomipz 3453 days ago
Mellanox and Solarflare certainly have carved out a nice market for themselves. They are not cheap though which is I guess why they are mostly found in trading shops since latency likely equates to money being left on the table.
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skuhn 3452 days ago
High frequency trading is Solarflare's original market (and Mellanox has their InfiniBand market), but both of them are becoming more and more common in the commodity server market as well. Particularly since Intel dropped the ball on 40G (and REALLY dropped the ball on 25/100G), and Broadcom is out of the adapter market, there is a void that other vendors are filling.

When you're spending $30,000 on a server, it doesn't really matter if you spend $1200 on a network card. Those CPU cycles and storage bytes have to go somewhere to make money.

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bogomipz 3452 days ago
I totally agree. It sounds like their price points @ $1,200 have come down as well.

Did Intel just never get 25/100G card to market?

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skuhn 3452 days ago
Not yet. They launched 40G a while ago, but some issues have kept them from the same kind of dominance they had with 10G.

25G is supposedly coming soon-ish, but 100G is still 1-2 years away. It's going to be hard to compete with vendors who shipped their first products in 2015/2016.

Meanwhile they have a 100G OmniPath adapter, but who cares?

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bogomipz 3452 days ago
>"but some issues have kept them from the same kind of dominance they had with 10G."

Oh interesting. Can you elaborate on those issue are with 40 Gig cards?

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