* nanog@shankland.org (Jim Shankland) [Thu 06 Dec 2001, 17:28 CET]:
Does anybody have any rough figures for what kind of load (both bytes/s total throughput and packets/s) a more or less vanilla x86 running a free OS can handle today? The last time I looked at this --
From the FreeBSD commit logs of src/sys/i386/conf/NOTES (rev 1.961):
| Add device driver support for the Broadcom BCM570x family of gigabit | ethernet controllers. This adds support for the 3Com 3c996-T, the | SysKonnect SK-9D21 and SK-9D41, and the built-in gigE NICs on | Dell PowerEdge 2550 servers. The latter configuration hauls ass: | preliminary measurements show TCP speeds of over 900Mbps using | only normal size frames. | | TCP/IP checksum offload, jumbo frames and VLAN tag insertion/stripping | are supported, as well as interrupt moderation. | | Still need to fix autonegotiation support for 1000baseSX NICs, but | beyond that, driver is pretty solid.
Hypothetically, a box that could handle, say, 750 Mb/s is not suitable for "core" use, but it can certainly handle more than "a couple of T1s."
Depends on what your core looks like. Note that the above were TCP speeds, not packet forwarding speeds; I assume counts for the latter would be slightly higher. To save you some clicking, a PowerEdge 2550 is a 2U chassis with one of those adapters on-board connected to a 64-bit 66 MHz PCI bus, three free 64-bit 33 MHz PCI slots, dual Pentium III CPUs and oodles of ECC 133 MHz SDRAM with memory interleaving support. Oh, and please note that I am staying very far away from a discussion of PC vs. Cisco equipment quality and software reliability. :-) Regards, -- Niels.