CPU load maxed out, why is this happening? Netbalancer

[FlashEngineer]

So I’m testing out my maximum throughput, I have a DSL and Cable connection, both at around 25Mbps, and using newsgroup I have set the hosts to connect to saturate 2 connections to try to get 50Mbps (which I was not getting even)

When running this test, my maximum speed was around 32Mbps, way below the 50Mbps I was expecting… anyways

I checked the CPU load average, and when having both links downloading I was at 100% cpu. I’m running an 1.6Ghz dual core within ESXi server but I’ve only given Zeroshell 1 core processor.

The MB/Apu combo is the Asus E35M-1

Is this normal? I thought zeroshell won’t use much cpu with even like gigabyte links or 40 hosts etc. I’m just running this and saturate the CPU?

Or could this be due to ESXi?

I have 8GB of memory as well and 60GB SSD, zeroshell is running off USB flash.

[atheling]

I haven’t run things under ESXi so I don’t know what sort of overhead that adds.

Zeroshell is basically just a GUI front end that configures a pretty basic Linux system. And the network traffic management (routing, net balancing, etc.) is all done in the Linux kernel. From what I’ve read and experienced, Linux does a pretty efficient job of that. Not as good as high end routers with hardware acceleration of traffic classification and packet forwarding. But pretty good for a general purpose operating system.

You have faster Internet connections than I but I can achieve 25Mbps using a 500MHz Net5501. Not sure of the CPU load at that point because all my Internet provider claims is 20Mbps so I wasn’t looking for things that could be slowing down my connection.

How does ESXi deal with virtualized network interfaces? is there OS overhead there?

[FlashEngineer]

@atheling wrote:

I haven’t run things under ESXi so I don’t know what sort of overhead that adds.

Zeroshell is basically just a GUI front end that configures a pretty basic Linux system. And the network traffic management (routing, net balancing, etc.) is all done in the Linux kernel. From what I’ve read and experienced, Linux does a pretty efficient job of that. Not as good as high end routers with hardware acceleration of traffic classification and packet forwarding. But pretty good for a general purpose operating system.

You have faster Internet connections than I but I can achieve 25Mbps using a 500MHz Net5501. Not sure of the CPU load at that point because all my Internet provider claims is 20Mbps so I wasn’t looking for things that could be slowing down my connection.

How does ESXi deal with virtualized network interfaces? is there OS overhead there?

Yeah I would think most Linux based systems have little overhead, especially things like this, and extremely stable. My FreeNAS box has been trouble free for 2 years running and I stream bluray quality from the box to multiple systems at the same time. I only have also 1 NIC anyways on that machine.

So I think ESXi has some sort of major overhead in routing network packets or something? I really don’t know, I originally just wanted to install this right on the machine but I couldn’t get to work on the SSD but I may just install on the USB stick and run the DB off the SSD like before.

[FlashEngineer]

Well i’ve double checked now and basically the main culprits using TOP to check process use is PPPOE and irqkd or something, I forgot the actual name…

they both jump around 30-40% on TOP output, I’m not sure if I’m reading correctly but I’ve checked on my ESXi performance monitor and also the the zeroshell graphing thing.

So total I’m using 70-75% cpu use for those 2 process..

any reason why? PPPOE uses that much?

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