Very interesting study I had not seen, and a bummer. That really puts a cramp in my advocation of our CARP+pf load balancers/firewalls/gateways. Than again, what's a PIX box capable of?

I also had to switch to OpenBSD as there was a fatal crash with the bridge device in FreeBSD when used with my paticular OpenVPN/CARP/pf combination.

AFAIK pf/forwarding only takes place on one core and wouldn't take advantage of the other 3 cores, correct?

-Patrick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Adrian Chadd" <adrian@creative.net.au>
To: "Chris Grundemann" <cgrundemann@gmail.com>
Cc: "William Herrin" <herrin-nanog@dirtside.com>, nanog@nanog.org
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2008 6:02:03 PM (GMT-0800) America/Los_Angeles
Subject: Re: 10GE router resource


On Tue, Mar 25, 2008, Chris Grundemann wrote:

> To Ann's question on resources; I have only used Linux routers with 1G
> ports but have surpassed 10G total throughput (up+ down) using various
> dual proc set ups, most often Intel Xeon in Dell servers.  A gentlemen
> by the name of Martin Pels wrote a good paper on the subject early
> last year that can be found here:
> http://docs.rodecker.nl/10-GE_Routing_on_Linux.pdf.  He hit a wall at
> 700K pps and was using two dual core Intel Xeon 64bit 2.33GHz CPUs and
> 2GB of RAM in a Dell PowerEdge 1950.

Mike Tancsa did some benchmarking in late 2006:

http://www.tancsa.com/blast.html

I think things are slightly faster now but not because of a massive
change in software architecture.




Adrian