Has anyone tried to bond interfaces together? I figure with LACP
bonding of all four qeX interfaces the thing would be just fine over the
NFS with *almost* reseonable performance.
Admittedly I haven't tried bonding interfaces, but I do suspect you're likely running into SBus limits or possibly even MBus limits there rather than anything about the NIC itself. The quad ethernet should be able to do 100 Mb/s, no? I believe the theoretical max throughout isn't too far off from that.
Anecdotally, I've never seen better than 760kB/s (~6Mb/s) on an SS5 with a 170MHz TurboSparc. But that was with an SSL connection and the usual HTTP overhead. And on a sketchy gigabit fibre driver I hand rolled.