Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:11:14 +0200 (CEST) From: sthaug@net...
A collegue smartbits tested a 1GHz pc, with a full feed and 250k simoultaneons flows it managed around 250kpps. This also with freebsd and device polling. It sounds to me like a software based machine can be plenty fast with good code under the hood.
Stock BSD (and Linux) routing code are hardly optimal. With some effort, 210 clk/lookup on a P4 Prescott is doable under a fairly stressful test case. I'd have to go back and dig up details, but that was FIB in < 512 kB, 135 kroute (full table at the time), ~600 different next-hop possibilities, choosing mostly packets with valid next-hop (which was slower than !N packets). Test was in userland with 4 kB pages, so there was a fair amount of TLB churn; I didn't test with large pages. Stock *ix, however, is a much different story. ;-)
Sorry, in today's world of high-end routers 250kpps doesn't qualify as "plenty fast". Can your box do linerate Gigabit Ethernet with minimum size packets, on several ports simultaneously?
Alternatively, one can have a "production" GigE port and a "backplane" GigE port that connects to an ethernet switch, essentially making each router an intelligent single-port GigE blade. Eddy -- Everquick Internet - http://www.everquick.net/ A division of Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - http://www.brotsman.com/ Bandwidth, consulting, e-commerce, hosting, and network building Phone: +1 785 865 5885 Lawrence and [inter]national Phone: +1 316 794 8922 Wichita ________________________________________________________________________ DO NOT send mail to the following addresses: davidc@brics.com -*- jfconmaapaq@intc.net -*- sam@everquick.net Sending mail to spambait addresses is a great way to get blocked. Ditto for broken OOO autoresponders and foolish AV software backscatter.