Hi All, I'm losing the will to live with this networking headache ! Please feel free to point me at a Linux list if NANOG isn't suitable. I'm at a loss where else to ask. I've diagnosed some traffic oddities and after lots of head-scratching, reading and trial and error I can say with certainty that: With and without shaping and over different bandwidth providers using the e1000 driver for an Intel PRO/1000 MT Dual Port Gbps NIC (82546EB) I can replicate full, expected throughput with UDP but consistently only get 300kbps - 600kbps throughput _per connection_ for outbound TCP (I couldn't find a tool I trusted to replicate ICMP traffic). Multiple connections are cumulative and increase incrementally at roughly 300kbps - 600kbps. Inbound seems slightly erratic in holding a consistent speed but manages 15Mbps as expected, a far cry from 300kbps to 600kbps. The router is Quad Core sitting at no load and there's very little traffic being forwarded back and forth. The NIC's kernel parameters are set at default as 'built-in'. NAPI is not enabled though (enabling it requires a reboot which is a problem as this box is in production). The only other change to the box is that over Christmas IPtables (ip_conntrack and its associated modules mainly) was loaded into the kernel as 'built-in'. There's no sign of packet loss on any tests and I upped the conntrack max_connections size suitably for the amount of RAM. Has anyone come across IPtables without any rules loaded causing throughput issues ? I've also changed the following kernel parameters with no luck: net.core.rmem_max = 16777216 net.core.wmem_max = 16777216 net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 16777216 net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 65536 16777216 net.ipv4.tcp_no_metrics_save = 1 net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 2500 echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling It feels to me like a buffer limit is being reached 'per connection'. The throughput spikes at around 1.54Mbps and TCP backs off to about 300kbps - 600kbps or so. What am I missing ? Is NAPI that essential for such low traffic ? A very similar build moved far higher throughput on cheap NICs. MTU is at 1500, txqueuelen is 1000. Any help would be massively appreciated ! Chris