[44640] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Open Source BGP-router?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Neil J. McRae)
Thu Dec 6 11:39:18 2001
In-Reply-To: <200112061632.IAA23564@ndk.shankland.org> from Jim Shankland at "Dec 6, 2001 08:32:19 am"
To: nanog@shankland.org (Jim Shankland)
Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 16:39:47 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
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From: neil@DOMINO.ORG (Neil J. McRae)
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
> 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 --
> several years ago -- I seemed to top out at somewhere close to 200
> Mb/s total throughput; I figured I could safely count on 100 Mb/s.
> That is consistent with a 32-bit PCI bus running at 33 MHz: raw
> capacity is 1 Gb/s, but each bit takes two trips over the bus, so
> that's 500 Mb/s, but then there's substantial bus overhead
> (contention, burst setup overhead, etc.).
It should be alot I agree but you have to factor in drivers, other cards
esp if [ISA] disk drives video cards etc.
>
> I didn't look at packet count limits, as they didn't seem to be
> a problem for me in my actual traffic mix; but I expect that with
> enough small packets, packet count would become the limiting factor.
>
> That was in the days when a Pentium 133 was a mid-range PC. I would
> expect faster memories, bigger caches, but (most of all) a 64-bit
> PCI bus running at 66 MHz to make a big difference.
>
> 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."
Only if you have a decent serial card, which I've never seen.
Neil.
