image stream routers

Sun Sep 18 00:17:33 UTC 2005

> Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:11:14 +0200 (CEST)
> From: sthaug at net...

>> A collegue smartbits tested a 1GHz pc, with a full feed and 250k
>> simoultaneons flows it managed around 250kpps. This also with freebsd
>> and device polling. It sounds to me like a software based machine can
>> be plenty fast with good code under the hood.

Stock BSD (and Linux) routing code are hardly optimal.  With some 
effort, 210 clk/lookup on a P4 Prescott is doable under a fairly 
stressful test case.

I'd have to go back and dig up details, but that was FIB in < 512 kB, 
135 kroute (full table at the time), ~600 different next-hop 
possibilities, choosing mostly packets with valid next-hop (which was 
slower than !N packets).  Test was in userland with 4 kB pages, so there 
was a fair amount of TLB churn; I didn't test with large pages.

Stock *ix, however, is a much different story. ;-)

> Sorry, in today's world of high-end routers 250kpps doesn't qualify as
> "plenty fast". Can your box do linerate Gigabit Ethernet with minimum
> size packets, on several ports simultaneously?

Alternatively, one can have a "production" GigE port and a "backplane" 
GigE port that connects to an ethernet switch, essentially making each 
router an intelligent single-port GigE blade.

Eddy
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