On Mon, 28 Jul 2008, Rev. Jeffrey Paul wrote:
As much as I hate to contribute to the problem, I'd like to point out that the barrage of useless, off-topic, empty traffic on this list in the last week is, in my estimation, quite a bit above the "usual" ruckus of NANOG.
While I'm not one to thunk down the rulebook, can you all collectively knock it off?
I gotta disagree with you, especially with regard to this thread. Much of the conversations on this topic have ancillary benefits, specifically for folks who need to populate networks with things like 10g forensic sensors or similiar. I don't see commodity hardware router discussions being any different from a foundry vs juniper vs crisco discussion, be it typical fanboy nonsense or otherwise. As far as active threads on nanog go, the signal to noise ratio on this one has already far exceeded more 'operational' ones. Even anecdotal experiences noted thus far have been pretty insightful, and useful. I even totally resisted the urge of bombing the thread by extolling the virtues of the Killer NIC as a solution to all the throughput problems people have, because I felt it would really derail what has thus far been a fairly educational thread. That said though, the more I thought about it (the killer nic joke), the more I looked at it. What's the state of NPU offloading amongst software routers? Is the notion even viable? I've seen a couple remarks about various brands of network cards having various buffer and interrupt driven issues as serious limiters to pps throughput, which is what prompted me to think of it in the first place. - billn