How to increase the network bandwidth#

You can increase the network bandwidth of your Incus setup by configuring the transmit queue length (txqueuelen). This change makes sense in the following scenarios:

You have a NIC with 1 GbE or higher on a Incus host with a lot of local activity (instance-instance connections or host-instance connections).
You have an internet connection with 1 GbE or higher on your Incus host.

The more instances you use, the more you can benefit from this tweak.

Note

The following instructions use a txqueuelen value of 10000, which is commonly used with 10GbE NICs, and a net.core.netdev_max_backlog value of 182757. Depending on your network, you might need to use different values.

In general, you should use small txqueuelen values with slow devices with a high latency, and high txqueuelen values with devices with a low latency. For the net.core.netdev_max_backlog value, a good guideline is to use the minimum value of the net.ipv4.tcp_mem configuration.

Increase the network bandwidth on the Incus host#

Complete the following steps to increase the network bandwidth on the Incus host:

Increase the transmit queue length (txqueuelen) of both the real NIC and the Incus NIC (for example, incusbr0). You can do this temporarily for testing with the following command:
```
ifconfig <interface> txqueuelen 10000
```
To make the change permanent, add the following command to your interface configuration in /etc/network/interfaces:
```
up ip link set eth0 txqueuelen 10000
```
Increase the receive queue length (net.core.netdev_max_backlog). You can do this temporarily for testing with the following command:
```
echo 182757 > /proc/sys/net/core/netdev_max_backlog
```
To make the change permanent, add the following configuration to /etc/sysctl.conf:
```
net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 182757
```

Increase the transmit queue length on the instances#

You must also change the txqueuelen value for all Ethernet interfaces in your instances. To do this, use one of the following methods:

Apply the same changes as described above for the Incus host.
Set the queue.tx.length device option on the instance profile or configuration.