Interrupt moderation only gives a modest improvement, as can be seen from the benchmarking done by Intel.
Intel would also not have gone through the effort to develop DPDK if all you had to do to achieve linerate performance would be to enable interrupt moderation.
Furthermore, quoting Gbps numbers is beside the point when the limiting factor is packets per second. It is trivial to improve Gbps numbers simply by using larger packets.
I'm quoting bulk transfer, with 1500 MTU. I could run jumbo packets for my internal network test and probably get better numbers, but jumbo packets are hard. When I was quoting https download on public internet, that pretty much means MTU 1500 as well, but was definitely the case.
If you're sending smaller packets, sure, that's harder. I guess that's a big deal if you're a DNS server, or voip (audio only); but if you're doing any sort of bulk transfer, you're getting large enough packets.
> Intel would also not have gone through the effort to develop DPDK if all you had to do to achieve linerate performance would be to enable interrupt moderation.
DPDK has uses, sure. But you don't need it for 10G on decent hardware, which includes 7 year old server chips, if you're just doing bulk transfer.
Intel would also not have gone through the effort to develop DPDK if all you had to do to achieve linerate performance would be to enable interrupt moderation.
Furthermore, quoting Gbps numbers is beside the point when the limiting factor is packets per second. It is trivial to improve Gbps numbers simply by using larger packets.