Ostinato Live ISO Maximum Transmit Rate
Update (2021): Ostinato now supports 10G, 25G and 40Gbps line-rate rate traffic using the Turbo Transmit add-on.
As part of the Ostinato 0.9 release, I also packaged Ostinato as a Virtual appliance and a Live ISO. I wanted to check the maximum packet generation rate performance of these form factors, so I used Rufus to burn the Live ISO to a USB pendrive and booted off the USB to collect the numbers.
I configured a single stream as given below -
- Protocols: Mac, Ethernet II, IPv4, UDP, Pattern
- Source and Destination Mac addresses populated with the actual Mac addresses of the source and sink
- Source and Destination IP addresses populated with the actual IP addresses of the source and sink
- Packets/sec: 0
- Number of packets: 10 (default)
- After this stream: Goto first
Performance figures
Here are the numbers -
| Packet Size | Max Rate (Kpps) | Max Rate (Mbps) |
|---|---|---|
| 64 | 600 | 403 |
| 128 | 593 | 702 |
| 256 | 442 | 976 |
| 512 | 231 | 983 |
| 1024 | 118 | 986 |
| 1518 | 80 | 984 |
Mbps rate was calculated using the below formula to take into account the ethernet line overhead of 20 bytes (1 byte SFD + 7 byte preamble + 12 byte inter-packet gap) -
Rate (in Mbps) = (PacketSize + 20) * kppsRate * 8 / 1000
Specs
Software
Hardware
- Processor: Xeon E5-2620v4 @ 2.10GHz (8-core)
- RAM: 32GB
- NIC: Intel I218-V 1Gbps
Observations
- Although it’s a 8-core CPU, only one core reaches 100% CPU during the test - this is expected since for a single port, Ostinato doesn’t use more than one core
- RAM usage - 98MB
- Max traffic rate for 64 byte packets is only 403Mbps
- Max line rate (well - quite close to it) is reached for 256 byte packets and larger, but it never reaches 1000 Mbps even for larger packet size (i.e. lower Kpps rate) - I wonder why. It can’t be related to Ostinato itself, but something system related (if you have any thoughts on this, please share in the comments below)
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