High throughput bgp links using gentoo + stipped kernel

Sun May 19 15:28:30 UTC 2013

I had two Dell R3xx 1U servers with Quad Gige Cards in them and a few small
BGP connections for a few year. They were running CentOS 5 + Quagga with a
bunch of stuff turned off. Worked extremely well. We also had really small
traffic back then.

Server hardware has become amazingly fast under-the-covers these days. It
certainly still can't match an ASIC designed solution from Cisco etc, but
it should be able to push several GB of traffic.
In HPC storage applications, for example, we have multiple servers with
Quad 40Gig and IB pushing ~40GB of traffic of fairly large blocks. It's not
network, but it does demonstrate pushing data into daemon applications and
back down to the kernel at high rates.
Certainly a kernel routing table with no iptables and a small Quagga daemon
in the background can push similar.

In other words, get new hardware and design it flow.

On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 10:58 AM, Nick Khamis <symack at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 5/18/13, Michael McConnell <michael at winkstreaming.com> wrote:
> > Hello Nick,
> >
> > Your email is pretty generic, the likelihood of anyone being able to
> provide
> > any actual help or advice is pretty low. I suggest you check out
> Vyatta.org,
> > its an Open Source router solution that uses Quagga for its underlying
> BGP
> > management, and if you desire you can purpose a support package a few
> grand
> > a year.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Mike
> >
> > --
> >
> > Michael McConnell
> > WINK Streaming;
> > email: michael at winkstreaming.com
> > phone: +1 312 281-5433 x 7400
> > cell: +506 8706-2389
> > skype: wink-michael
> > web: http://winkstreaming.com
> >
> > On May 18, 2013, at 9:39 AM, Nick Khamis <symack at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hello Everyone,
> >>
> >> We are running:
> >>
> >> Gentoo Server on Dual Core Intel Xeon 3060, 2 Gb Ram
> >> Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82571EB Gigabit Ethernet
> >> Controller (rev 06)
> >> Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82573E Gigabit Ethernet
> >> Controller (rev 03)
> >>
> >> 2 bgp links from different providers using quagga, iptables etc....
> >>
> >> We are transmitting an average of 700Mbps with packet sizes upwards of
> >> 900-1000 bytes when the traffic graph begins to flatten. We also start
> >> experiencing some crashes at that point, and not have been able to
> >> pinpoint that either.
> >>
> >> I was hoping to get some feedback on what else we can strip from the
> >> kernel. If you have a similar setup for a stable platform the .config
> >> would be great!
> >>
> >> Also, what are your thoughts on migrating to OpenBSD and bgpd, not
> >> sure if there would be a performance increase, but the security would
> >> be even more stronger?
> >>
> >> Kind Regards,
> >>
> >> Nick
> >>
> >
> >
>
>
> Hello Michael,
>
> I totally understand how my question is generic in nature. I will
> defiantly take a look at Vyatta, and weigh the effort vs. benefit
> topic. The purpose of my email is to see how people with similar
> setups managed to get more out of their system using kernel tweaks or
> further stripping on their OS. In our case, we are using Gentoo.
>
> Nick.
>
>

-- 
Zach Giles
zgiles at gmail.com