Interrupt moderation only gives a modest improvement, as can be seen from the benchmarking done by Intel.
Intel would also not have gone through the effort to develop DPDK if all you had to do to achieve linerate performance would be to enable interrupt moderation.
Furthermore, quoting Gbps numbers is beside the point when the limiting factor is packets per second. It is trivial to improve Gbps numbers simply by using larger packets.
The core problem is that the Linux kernel uses interrupts for handling packets. This limits Linux networking performance in terms of packets per second. The limit is about a million packets per second per core.
For reference 10GE is about 16 million packets per second at line rate using small packets.
This is why you have to use kernel bypass software in user space to get linerate performance above 10G in Linux.
Popular software for this use case utilize DPDK, XDP or VPP.
> An ISP grows a large user base by doing aggressive price competition, then starts shaking down services, rate limiting their traffic if they don't pay up.
Yeah, we’ve already seen this in the Comcast/Netflix debacle and Deutche Telekom vs the world. In fact a lot of large incumbents do this.
> Meanwhile they use some of the shakedown money to lower prices and get more users.
If things were even so rosy. The shakedown money is used for larger profits and monopoly positions to get more users.
Until recently NBN fiber connections only came with 2 Mbps of bandwidth. Any usage over that was billed at $8 per Mbps to the ISP.
In other words, an ISP customer taking full advantage of their gigabit fiber connection could cost the ISP almost $8000 per month.
And that was just the cost for the local bandwidth in Australia. Add all the costs for cross connects and Internet capacity in addition to all the normal costs of running a business.
Obviously this was and is a millstone around the ISPs’ neck. You can find a plethora of complaints and write ups on the ISP business in Australia illuminating the extremely thin or negative margins in the business.
The only thing that kept the ISPs in business was statistical multiplexing at scale and aggressive traffic shaping.
The Australian NBN would also have sucked a lot less if the government hadn’t sneaked in usage fees on the network.
It is, or at least was, insanely expensive to use the Australian next generation network. It cost ISPs providing service on the network thousands of dollars per month if a fiber customer actually used their gigabit connection, instead of a fixed line rental fee.
GPON networks are often vendor locked. This means you cannot just buy any random SFP ONU and expect it work.
Even if you do get it to work, no ISP will offer you any kind of support if you do this. Some might even take to it poorly, if they find out.
Generally, the best option is to ask your ISP if they offer other ONU models and choose from those.