Troubleshooting Solaris network connection performance

Diagnosing Solaris network problems when you have a slow connectivity is straight forward, simply use netstat -i to monitor performance.

For example:

root@solaris# netstat -i
Name  Mtu  Net/Dest   Address    Ipkts     Ierrs Opkts     Oerrs Collis Queue
lo0   8232 loopback   localhost  43523390  0     43523390  0     0      0
hme0  1500 <hostname> <hostname> 561847305 886   483621617 0     0      0
hme1  1500 <hostname> <hostname> 13480886  1     1521743   0     0      0

Entries to look at are:

• Input packets (Ipkts)
• Input errors (Ierrs)
• Output packets (Opkts)
• Collisions (Collis)

Network collision rate

Calcuate: network collision rate = Collis / Opkts

If your network collision rate is greater than 10%, this generally indicates:

• Overloaded network
• Poorly configured network
• Hardware problems

Input packet error rate

Calculate: input packet error rate = Ierrs /Ipkts

If the input packet error rate is greater than 0.25%, the your hosts is dropping packets. To diagnose, check your hub/switch, cables for potential problems.

Using 'ndd'

We can use the ndd command to determine the ethernet interfaces link speed, and status. In our exmple we are querying interface hme0 with the following commands:.

root@solaris# ndd -get /dev/hme0 link_status
1
root@solaris# ndd -get /dev/hme0 link_mode
1
root@solaris# ndd -get /dev/hme0 link_speed
1

Interpreting the above output:

Using 'netstat'

We can also use the netstat -k command to obtain the same information. For example:

root@solaris# netstat -k ce1 | egrep ?link_speed|link_status|link_duplex?
lp_cap_asmpause 1 lp_cap_pause 0 link_T4 0 link_speed 1000
link_duplex 2 link_asmpause 0 link_pause 0 link_up 1 mac_mtu 1522

Interpreting the above output: