ixgbe Counters

The ixgbe driver provides a long list of counters for interface debug and monitoring through the ethtool -S <ethX> command. It can be helpful to watch the output while a workload is running and/or compare the counter values before and after a workload run.

1. To get a full dump of ixgbe counters: ethtool -S <ethX>
2. To watch just non-zero counters: watch -d (ethtool -S <ethX>) | egrep -v :\ 0 | column
3. To check for dropped RX packets: ethtool -S <ethX> | grep dropped
4. rx_​dropped indicates that the CPU is not servicing buffers fast enough.
5. port.rx_​dropped indicates that something is not fast enough in the slot/memory/system.