It's a useful utils to simplify Linux network troubleshooting and performance tuning, developed in order to help Carbon Reductor techsupport and automate the whole linux performance tuning process out of box (ok, except the best RSS layout detection). It's now in production usage with 300+ deployment and save us a lot of time with hardware and software settings debugging. Should work well with Python 2.6 and Python 2.7. Inspired by packagecloud's blog post.

pip install netutils-linux

All these top-like utils don't require root priveledges or sudo usage. So you can install and use them as non-priveledged user if you care about security.

pip install --user netutils-linux

Brief explanation about highlighting colors for CPU and device groups: green and red are for NUMA-nodes, blue and yellow for CPU sockets. Screenshots are taken from different hosts with different hardware.

Most useful util in this repo that includes all top-like utils and allow to monitor interrupts, soft interrupts, network processing statistic for devices and CPUs.

• Show you a rate of interrupts
• based on /proc/interrupts file
• Hides the interrupts with small rate to show a better picture.

• Show you a rate of receiving/transmitting packets
• Based on /proc/softirqs

• Shows how many packets/bytes network interface receives/transmite and how many errors happened
• Based on /sys/class/net/XXX/statistic/YYY files

Shows various statistic of packets processing per CPU.

Automatically set smp_affinity_list for IRQ of NIC rx/tx queues for ixgbe/igb/vmxnet3 drivers (they usually work on CPU0 out of the box).

Based on lscpu's output.

It also supports double/quad ladder in case of multiprocessor systems (but you better explicitly specify queue count == core per socket as NIC's driver's param).

# rss-ladder eth1 0
- Распределение прерываний eth1 (-TxRx-) на сокете 0
  - eth1: irq 67 eth1-TxRx-0 -> 0
  - eth1: irq 68 eth1-TxRx-1 -> 1
  - eth1: irq 69 eth1-TxRx-2 -> 2
  - eth1: irq 70 eth1-TxRx-3 -> 3
  - eth1: irq 71 eth1-TxRx-4 -> 8
  - eth1: irq 72 eth1-TxRx-5 -> 9
  - eth1: irq 73 eth1-TxRx-6 -> 10
  - eth1: irq 74 eth1-TxRx-7 -> 11

Enables RPS of NIC on all available CPUs. It may be good for small servers with cheap network cards or a bunch of VLAN.

Later, there will be a support for enabling RPS only for a subgroup of CPUs based on L3 caches.

Sets every CPU scaling governor mode to performance and set max scaling value for min scaling value. So you will be able to use all power of your processor (useful for latency sensible systems).

rx-buffers-increase utils, that finds and sets compromise-value between avoiding dropped/missing pkts and keeping a latency low.

Example output:

# ethtool -g eth1

Ring parameters for eth1:
Pre-set maximums:
RX:           4096
RX Mini:      0
RX Jumbo:     0
TX:           4096
Current hardware settings:
RX:           256
RX Mini:      0
RX Jumbo:     0
TX:           256

# rx-buffers-increase eth1

run: ethtool -G eth1 rx 2048

# rx-buffers-increase eth1

eth1's rx ring buffer already has fine size.

# ethtool -g eth1

Ring parameters for eth1:
Pre-set maximums:
RX:           4096
RX Mini:      0
RX Jumbo:     0
TX:           4096
Current hardware settings:
RX:           2048
RX Mini:      0
RX Jumbo:     0
TX:           256

Much alike lshw but designed for network processing role of server.

# server-info show
cpu:
  info:
    Architecture: x86_64
    BogoMIPS: 6799.9899999999998
    Byte Order: Little Endian
    CPU MHz: 3399.998
    CPU family: 6
    CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
    CPU(s): 2
    Core(s) per socket: 1
    Hypervisor vendor: KVM
    L1d cache: 32K
    L1i cache: 32K
    L2 cache: 4096K
    Model: 13
    Model name: QEMU Virtual CPU version (cpu64-rhel6)
    NUMA node(s): 1
    NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0,1
    On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1
    Socket(s): 2
    Stepping: 3
    Thread(s) per core: 1
    Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
    Virtualization type: full
  layout:
    '0': '0'
    '1': '1'
disk:
  sr0:
    model: QEMU DVD-ROM
  vda:
    model: null
    size: 64424509440
    type: HDD
memory:
  MemFree: 158932
  MemTotal: 1922096
  SwapFree: 4128764
  SwapTotal: 4128764
net:
  eth1:
    buffers:
      cur: 2048
      max: 4096
    conf:
      ip: 10.144.63.1/24
      vlan: true
    driver:
      driver: e1000
      version: 7.3.21-k8-NAPI
    queues:
      own: []
      rx: []
      rxtx: []
      shared:
      - virtio1, eth0, eth1
      tx: []
      unknown: []

It also can rate hardware and its features in range of 1..10.

# server-info rate
cpu:
  BogoMIPS: 7
  CPU MHz: 7
  CPU(s): 1
  Core(s) per socket: 1
  L3 cache: 1
  Socket(s): 10
  Thread(s) per core: 10
  Vendor ID: 10
 disk:
   sr0:
     size: 1
     type: 2
   vda:
     size: 1
     type: 1
 memory:
   MemTotal: 1
   SwapTotal: 10
 net:
   eth1:
     buffers:
       cur: 5
       max: 10
     driver: 1
     queues: 1
 system:
   Hypervisor vendor: 1
   Virtualization type: 1