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Re: PC Routers (was Re: /24s run amuck)

  • From: Richard A Steenbergen
  • Date: Wed Jan 14 23:14:14 2004

On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 04:34:00AM +0100, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
> 
> > o) On a standard PCI but your limit is about 350Mb, you can increase that to a 
> > couple of Gb using 64-bit fancy thingies
> 
> The limit is not megabit/s, it's packet per second (or rather, interrupts 
> per second). I-mix the average might be 350 megabit/s on a fairly good PC, 
> but going PCI-X wont help you much there.

I also think that it is extremely important to seperate "what you can do 
with a redhat cd and a dream" from "what someone can do with PC hardware".

The bottom line is: You are only going to get so much performance when you
forward packets through a box which is processing an interrupt per packet,
doing a patricia tree lookup per packet, copying the packet in memory a
couple times, and doing some sequential comparisons through a firewall
ruleset on every packet. None of the above has anything to do with PC
hardware, but rather the poor software that people currently making "PC
routers" choose to run.

If someone were to take *half* the software innovations which have been
made over the past 15 years (a decent fib, interrupt coalescing, compiled
packet matching rulesets, etc) and applied them as if they knew something
about networking and coding, they could very easily produce a box using
off the shelf PC hardware which woops up on a 7206vxr for somewhere less
than $2000. If there is one thing PC hardware is good at, it is getting
faster fast enough to keep up with the amount of bad code people keep
churning out. :) Of course, then they would probably need to know a little
bit more about routing protocols than just "how to compile zebra", but
assuming they did that too... They would be bought by Cisco. :)

Anything else is either a cute playtoy for your house, or an endless
source of laughter for the people who know better as they watch you work
away at it. The vast majority of this discussion falls into the latter
category, but after a while even this gem of a subject turns from funny to
just plain sad. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <[email protected]>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)