[106125] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Software router state of the art
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Herrin)
Wed Jul 23 12:07:41 2008
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:07:23 -0400
From: "William Herrin" <herrin-nanog@dirtside.com>
To: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
In-Reply-To: <13218.1216826659@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu, zzuser@yahoo.com
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 11:24 AM, <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:52:56 PDT, Zed Usser said:
>> There's been some discussion on the list regarding software routers
>
> The performance of "software routers" has always had a hardware component.
>
> Basically, for the vast majority of them, take your PCI bus bandwidth,
> count how many times a packet has to cross it, and do the math. You can't
> forward more than that much traffic no matter *what* software you run on
> that box. If that number falls short, stop right there and look for
> some box of different design that has the required backplane bandwidth.
The Endace DAG cards claim they can move 7 gbps over a PCI-X bus from
the NIC to main DRAM. They claim a full 10gbps on a PCIE bus.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
--
William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
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