[106130] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Software router state of the art
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joel Jaeggli)
Wed Jul 23 12:51:06 2008
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:50:37 -0700
From: Joel Jaeggli <joelja@bogus.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
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.
>
> You will, of course, take additional performance hits due to locking issues
> and similar in your software stack (that, and most "software" routers will
> suffer from not having special hardware assist for routing table lookups).
The current state of the art is around 2 million pps for fast intel arch
system.
> Let us know if you find a suitable chassis/motherboard that has enough
> bandwidth to make it worth thinking about for anything other than the
> smaller edge routers that most providers have zillions of... :)
>
