Re: [net-next PATCH 3/3] net: stmmac: increase TX coalesce timer to 5ms

[Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>]

On Fri, Sep 22, 2023 at 01:12:47PM +0200, Christian Marangi wrote:
> Commit 8fce33317023 ("net: stmmac: Rework coalesce timer and fix
> multi-queue races") decreased the TX coalesce timer from 40ms to 1ms.
> 
> This caused some performance regression on some target (regression was
> reported at least on ipq806x) in the order of 600mbps dropping from
> gigabit handling to only 200mbps.
> 
> The problem was identified in the TX timer getting armed too much time.
> While this was fixed and improved in another commit, performance can be
> improved even further by increasing the timer delay a bit moving from
> 1ms to 5ms.
> 
> The value is a good balance between battery saving by prevending too
> much interrupt to be generated and permitting good performance for
> internet oriented devices.

ethtool has a settings you can use for this:

      ethtool -C|--coalesce devname [adaptive-rx on|off] [adaptive-tx on|off]
              [rx-usecs N] [rx-frames N] [rx-usecs-irq N] [rx-frames-irq N]
              [tx-usecs N] [tx-frames N] [tx-usecs-irq N] [tx-frames-irq N]
              [stats-block-usecs N] [pkt-rate-low N] [rx-usecs-low N]
              [rx-frames-low N] [tx-usecs-low N] [tx-frames-low N]
              [pkt-rate-high N] [rx-usecs-high N] [rx-frames-high N]
              [tx-usecs-high N] [tx-frames-high N] [sample-interval N]
              [cqe-mode-rx on|off] [cqe-mode-tx on|off] [tx-aggr-max-bytes N]
              [tx-aggr-max-frames N] [tx-aggr-time-usecs N]

If this is not implemented, i suggest you add support for it.

Changing the default might cause regressions. Say there is a VoIP
application which wants this low latency? It would be safer to allow
user space to configure it as wanted.

     Andrew