Enhanced 10 Gigabit Ethernet Performance

The Solaris 10 10/09 includes many enhancements to the Solaris 10GbE drivers. The nxge 10GbE driver includes the following enhancements:

• TCP receive throughput is improved from 40% at 8 connections to over 90% improvements for 32, 100, 400, and 1000 connections

• TCP transmit throughput is improved from almost 80% at 8 connections to over 100% for the higher connection tests

• UDP transmit throughput is improved from 80% for 64 byte messages to over 160% for 8 Kbyte messages

The ixgbe driver on x86 systems includes the following enhancements:

• TCP transmit throughput is improved to almost 100% for 8 or more connections

• TCP receive rates are 10Gb line rate for 8, 32, 100, 400, and 1000 connections

• UDP transmit maximum throughput doubles to 10Gb line rate

• Ping pong data rates are improved from 2x to 3x as the message size increases from 64 bytes to 512 bytes

Solaris 10GbE drivers can now deliver close to line data rates providing optimal performance on 10 Gigabit networks.