scaling linux-based router hardware recommendations

Tue Jan 27 00:07:28 UTC 2015

One thing to note about Ubiquiti's EdgeMax products is that they are not
Intel based.  They use Cavium Octeon's (at least that's what my EdgeRouter
Lite has in it).

Oliver

-------------------------------------

Oliver Garraux
Check out my blog:  blog.garraux.net
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On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 4:18 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco at ns.sol.net> wrote:

> > I know that specially programmed ASICs on dedicated hardware like Cisco,
> > Juniper, etc. are going to always outperform a general purpose server
> > running gnu/linux, *bsd... but I find the idea of trying to use
> > proprietary, NSA-backdoored devices difficult to accept, especially when
> > I don't have the budget for it.
> >
> > I've noticed that even with a relatively modern system (supermicro with
> > a 4 core 1265LV2 CPU, with a 9MB cache, Intel E1G44HTBLK Server
> > adapters, and 16gig of ram, you still tend to get high percentage of
> > time working on softirqs on all the CPUs when pps reaches somewhere
> > around 60-70k, and the traffic approaching 600-900mbit/sec (during a
> > DDoS, such hardware cannot typically cope).
> >
> > It seems like finding hardware more optimized for very high packet per
> > second counts would be a good thing to do. I just have no idea what is
> > out there that could meet these goals. I'm unsure if faster CPUs, or
> > more CPUs is really the problem, or networking cards, or just plain old
> > fashioned tuning.
>
> 10-15 years ago, we were seeing early Pentium 4 boxes capable of moving
> 100Kpps+ on FreeBSD.  See for example
> http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/polling/
>
> Luigi moved on to Netmap, which looks promising for this sort of
> thing.
> https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc12/atc12-final186.pdf
> I was under the impression that some people have been using this for
> 10G routing.
>
> Also I'll note that Ubiquiti has some remarkable low-power gear capable
> of 1Mpps+.
>
> ... JG
> --
> Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
> "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and]
> then I
> won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail
> spam(CNN)
> With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many
> apples.
>