Receive Side Scaling on VMware

30. december 2019
Receive side scaling

by Henrik Wendt, Development Manager

Receive Side Scaling: This is “just” a little tip with a huge impact on your daily operation.

If you work in a VMware environment, there’s a subtle little setting that can greatly enhance the performance of your virtual servers.

The setting is called Receive Side Scaling (RSS) and is configured for the ‘vmxnet3’ Network Adapter. If this setting is disabled, all incoming network traffic is handled by CPU0 – even though this CPU may be overloaded while the remaining CPUs are sitting idle.

For servers with high network load, performance can be dramatically improved by enabling RSS as this allows the server to utilize all CPUs for handling the network traffic.

Receive side scaling

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