Over the past couple of weeks we have further improved the DNA performance, and thus we have decided to test its performance. In order to do reproducible measurements we decided to adopt the benchmark specified in RFC 2544. You can find the complete test details and results on this document: DNA_ip_forward_RFC2544.
As you can read we used a low-end single-CPU Supermicro server X9SCM, Linux Fedora Core 15, and a Spirent SRC-2002HS 10 Gbit traffic generator. On a nutshell DNA has not lost a single packet, even with 64 bytes (60 bytes packet + 4 bytes CRC) packets. Thanks to libzero the forward latency across ports is as low as 3.45 usec with minimal size packets. All this is amazing if you consider that these results have been achieved on commodity hardware, matching the performance of costly FPGA-based NICs.
Many thanks to Silicom for supporting the DNA development and benchmarking.