[toast0]

You don't need an interrupt per packet, at least not with sensible NICs and OSes. Something like 10k interrupts per second is good enough, pick up a bunch of packets on each interrupt; you do lose out slightly on latency, but gain a lot of throughput. Look up 'interrupt moderation', it's not new, and most cards should support it.

Professionlly, I ran dual xeon 2690v1 or v2 to 9Gbps for https download on FreeBSD; http hit 10G (only had one 10G to the internet on those machines), but crypto took too much CPU. Dual Xeon 2690v4 ran to 20Gbps, no problem (2x 14 core broadwell, much better AES acceleration, faster ram, more cores, etc, had dual 10G to the internet).

Personally, I've just setup 10G between my two home servers, and can only manage about 5-8Gbps with iperf3, but that's with a pentium g2020 on one end (dual core Ivy Bridge, 10 years old at this point), and the network cards are configured for bridging, which means no tcp offloading.

Edit: also, check out what Netflix has been doing with 800Gbps, although sendfile and TLS in the kernel cuts out a lot of userspace, kind of equal but opposite of cutting out kernelspace, http://nabstreamingsummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/202...

[iptrans]

Interrupt moderation only gives a modest improvement, as can be seen from the benchmarking done by Intel.

Intel would also not have gone through the effort to develop DPDK if all you had to do to achieve linerate performance would be to enable interrupt moderation.

Furthermore, quoting Gbps numbers is beside the point when the limiting factor is packets per second. It is trivial to improve Gbps numbers simply by using larger packets.

[toast0]

I'm quoting bulk transfer, with 1500 MTU. I could run jumbo packets for my internal network test and probably get better numbers, but jumbo packets are hard. When I was quoting https download on public internet, that pretty much means MTU 1500 as well, but was definitely the case.

If you're sending smaller packets, sure, that's harder. I guess that's a big deal if you're a DNS server, or voip (audio only); but if you're doing any sort of bulk transfer, you're getting large enough packets.

> Intel would also not have gone through the effort to develop DPDK if all you had to do to achieve linerate performance would be to enable interrupt moderation.

DPDK has uses, sure. But you don't need it for 10G on decent hardware, which includes 7 year old server chips, if you're just doing bulk transfer.

[iptrans]

Bulk transfers aren’t that being interesting from a networking perspective.

You gonna have a bad time if you optimize only for the best case scenario.

Even using IMIX is a low bar. The proper way to do things is linerate using small packets.