NIC Ring Buffer Tuning: Packet Drops, Backlog, and Performance Considerations
๐ Table of Contents Introduction to NIC Ring Buffer Issues Understanding NIC Ring Buffer Checking Packet Drops Increasing Ring Buffer What Happens After Ring Buffer Network Budget Backlog Queue Introduction to NIC Ring Buffer Issues A company had a server that had been receiving real-time data at 100 Mbps without any major issues. However, when the incoming data rate was increased to 1 Gbps , service instability began to appear. Among several load-balanced servers, a few started falling out of sync and were excluded from the service pool. Since the system was designed with redundancy, the failure of one or two servers didn’t cause a complete outage—the remaining servers could still handle the traffic. Nevertheless, leaving this issue unresolved posed a risk of escalating into a full-scale service disruption. This prompted a detailed investigation. The root cause was identified fairly quickly. The network team had observed packet drop...