[16659] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Core router bakeoff?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Fri May 8 09:40:24 1998
To: Tony Li <tli@juniper.net>
cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-reply-to: Your message of "08 May 1998 00:51:44 PDT."
<827m3xw67j.fsf@chimp.juniper.net>
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Fri, 08 May 1998 09:33:46 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Tony Li writes:
> > BTW, NetBSD with the recent flow cache mods can handle at least
> > 150,000 packets per second. We haven't seen what the actual upper
> > limit is, but that number doesn't seem to be eating a lot of CPU.
>
> Interesting. Have you done any scalability testing? Per-flow state has
> been shown to scale poorly in Internet backbones.
I agree with you that it doesn't scale well to huge routers. I am
certain that it would work very badly in MCI's backbone. It probably
will work just fine in a small provider, though, and those are most of
the guys who want to roll their own out of PCs anyway.
If you want to pump half a gigabit through on a giant peering router,
caches will lose, and the only thing that will do you right is
real router hardware.
Perry
