When using a 10G NIC with a VLAN tagged interface over a bond, why does my network suffer a performance decrease on RHEL 6.3?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • Using a 10G bonded interface that is subsequently VLAN tagged, a performance decrease (up to around 50%) can be measured with tools such as netperf and iperf.
  • Generic Receive Offload (GRO) is by default disabled for the bonding module on some RHEL kernels, whereas upstream in later kernels it is enabled to better assist 10G network interfaces in a bond.

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.4 (kernel-2.6.32-358.el6) or earlier
  • Physical interfaces connected to virtual interface such as bonding, bridge, or VLAN

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