[Beowulf] ethernet bonding performance comparison "802.3ad" vs Adaptive Load Balancing

[Rahul Nabar]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 11:24 PM, Brian D Haymore
<brian.haymore at utah.edu> wrote:

> Can you send me your bonding options your setting in modprobe.conf?

Thanks for your comments, Brian! Here's my modprobe.conf

alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=6 miimon=100

[On other nodes I've tried mode=4 too but same performance and issues.]

> What is the topology including switches, routers, etc between server A and
> server B?

Really simple. A and B for the test I quote were both connected to the
same switch. (we do have two switches so later I'll also play with A*
and B* connected through as: A*<-->switch1<-->switch2<-->B*) But
that's about as complicated as our LAN gets.

>
> We have gone through a number of cycles with bonding here and have found a
> few interesting things about a number of switches from certain vendors as
> well as settings for linux in its use of bonding.  In the end we have come
> to fairly good terms with how to get things setup to utilize multiple links
> effectively.

What would your experience say, I'm really curious. Can I get a 2Gbps
node-to-node then? Or not? You are probably one of the few people I
actually heard from that have successfully implemented this type of
bonding. So, I'd really appreciate any comments / advice you might
have to offer us.

>  Also I would not call your Dell 1435's lower end really.  They
> have a fine set of on board NICs that will perform very well for you and a
> good expansion bus if your are using an add in card.

Ah! That's definitely a relief to know! :)

-- 
Rahul