North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Zebra Router???

  • From: Omachonu Ogali
  • Date: Sun Apr 20 13:03:37 2003

I had 1 GigE, 2 FastE interfaces, no full feeds, about 16k routes,
pushing 100-120Mbps, and I always hit 100% cpu, causing Zebra's BGP
process to die repeatedly. And, whenever I removed a route from the
Zebra daemon, it didn't get removed from the kernel routing table,
and a simple 'route delete x.x.x.x' did not work, so the route was
effectively STUCK until the next reboot. (No, killing and restarting
the Zebra processes did not work either, nor did a 'route flush').

I've tried different CPUs, motherboards, hard drives, network cards,
kernels, sysctl variables, memory modules, no, some, and all (about 80)
IPFW rules, and still, same results. 100% CPU while the box is sucking
ass at 40-50kpps. Bottom line, from my personal experiences, FreeBSD
sucks as a router, and Zebra sucks as a routing process.

Yeah yeah yeah, Juniper uses FreeBSD for their code, but a) it's heavily
modified, modifications you won't find on the net for yourself, b) they
use ASICs to speed up certain operations, and there is no PCI card with
a PacketGoFaster(tm) chipset you can buy to get better performance out
of your desktop gaming Samba-serving router. I hear Olive has some good
performance, but guess what, it's not public domain and your chances of
finding it are very slim, so you're SOL for now.

But hey, your mileage may vary.