Software router state of the art

Sat Jul 26 10:41:29 UTC 2008

* Adrian Chadd:

> 1 mil pps has been broken that way, but it uses lots of cores to get there.
> (8, I think?)

Was this with one packet flow, or with millions of them?

Traditionally, software routing performance on hosts systems has been
optimized for few and rather long flows.

Anyway, with multi-core, you don't need funky algorithms for incremental
FIB updates anymore (if you don't need sub-second convergence and stuff
like that).  As a result, you can use really dumb multi-way trees for
which a lookup takes something like 100 CPU cycles (significantly less
for non-DoS traffic with higher locality).