Core router bakeoff?

Fri May 8 13:33:46 UTC 1998

Tony Li writes:
> > BTW, NetBSD with the recent flow cache mods can handle at least
> > 150,000 packets per second. We haven't seen what the actual upper
> > limit is, but that number doesn't seem to be eating a lot of CPU.
> 
> Interesting.  Have you done any scalability testing?  Per-flow state has
> been shown to scale poorly in Internet backbones.  

I agree with you that it doesn't scale well to huge routers. I am
certain that it would work very badly in MCI's backbone. It probably
will work just fine in a small provider, though, and those are most of 
the guys who want to roll their own out of PCs anyway.

If you want to pump half a gigabit through on a giant peering router,
caches will lose, and the only thing that will do you right is
real router hardware.

Perry