Lab: Tuning a production UPF for line rate

Lab Scenario: From 1 Gbps to 40 Gbps

In this lab you will walk through tuning a production UPF that is severely under-performing. The starting point: 1 Gbps throughput per node despite running on 32-core servers with 100 GbE NICs and DPDK. The target: 40 Gbps line rate. The lab is structured as a diagnostic checklist that mirrors how production performance engineers actually approach UPF tuning. Each step diagnoses a specific bottleneck, applies a fix, re-measures, and moves to the next. The full checklist takes a UPF from 1 Gbps to 40 Gbps in roughly five iterations — large gains from misconfiguration fixes, smaller gains from…