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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Open Source BGP-router?
> 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.
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