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What problems can the use of TOE cause?

As known, TOE (TCP offload engine) offloads the processing of TCP/IP stack from CPU to the NIC: https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/networking/toe

  1. CPU has more free resources - so the user application runs faster

  2. Also it increases throughput and reduces latency of the network application: http://www.epsglobal.com/downloads/Chelsio/Chelsio-Solarflare-TL-1.pdf

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But why is it sometimes recommended to turn off the TOE? Disable TCP-Offloading {completely, generically and easily}

Why TOE can be so slow in some cases? https://fasterdata.es.net/host-tuning/nic-tuning/

It has been reported that both TCP Segmentation Offloading (TSO) and TCP Offload Engine (TOE) on the Chelsio NIC radically hurt performance on a WAN (they do help reduce CPU load without affecting throughput on a LAN). This is particularly true with a very fast CPU.

What problems can the use of TOE cause?

Alex
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    The [Support In Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_offload_engine#Support_in_Linux) section of the Wikipedia article on TOE has a good summary of the drawbacks. – Brian Jul 13 '17 at 22:38

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