Broadcom 5719/5720 NICs using tg3 driver becomes unresponsive and stops traffic in vSphere
I have been experiencing on a number of occastions a loss of network connectivity on my VM server network. After much analysis I have found in the errors logs excessive NetQueue messages similar to:- 2012-06-14T19:45:09.053Z cpu6:2092)<6>tg3 : vmnic3: RX NetQ allocated on 1 2012-06-14T19:45:09.053Z cpu6:2092)<6>tg3 : vmnic3: NetQ set RX Filter: 1 [00:50:56:6F:95:16 0] 2012-06-14T19:45:44.054Z cpu7:2092)<6>tg3 : vmnic3: NetQ remove RX filter: 1 2012-06-14T19:45:44.054Z cpu7:2092)<6>tg3 : vmnic3: Free NetQ RX Queue: 1 The performance enhancement from NetQueue does not benefit 1 Gb NICs. This feature spreads the network load across multiple CPUs, and a single CPU can handle around 3 Gb of network load. (more…)