[44642] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Open Source BGP-router?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Niels Bakker)
Thu Dec 6 12:02:43 2001
Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 18:01:44 +0100
From: Niels Bakker <niels=nanog@bakker.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
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In-Reply-To: <200112061632.IAA23564@ndk.shankland.org>; from nanog@shankland.org on Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 08:32:19AM -0800
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* 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.
