cpu needed to NAT 45mbs

Thu Nov 8 23:10:29 UTC 2007

> 	A second CPU or core will help tremendously. We used to use single-CPU
> boxes for this and we noticed that traffic sometimes stalls when the machine
> has to do some task other than NATting, such as expiring idle flows. Having
> a second CPU or core will help keep latency much more uniform.
> 
> 	We have a few dual 3.2Ghz Xeon boxes (not the ones based on Core, the older
> ones) that NAT/FW across two GE interfaces. They do quite well up to about
> 300Mb/s, then we start to see issues. We believe the issues are due to
> overloading the NB-SB link. A more modern mobo probably wouldn't have this
> problem.
> 

Since we are talking about PC Routers... 300Mb/s is a limitation we've 
seen before... especially related to Interrupts overwhelming the system. 
Modern ethernet cards (non-interrupt based) and a modern OS with support 
for all of their offloading and zero-copy functions will improve this 
greatly.

Current FreeBSD is signficantly faster than current Linux 
implementations for this kind of work.

But (as I told the OP privately) 45mb/s is a joke and doesn't really 
need anything more than a 400mhz P-II with two Intel EtherExpress cards 
and 1GB of RAM. Even for 4,000 downstream connections. A few $200-$300 
L3 switches can do this just as well.

Deepak Jain
AiNET