On Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 05:41:50PM +0100, Adolf Hohl wrote:
> Hi,
> i'm interested in ip-routing performance on gigabit ethernet hardware.
> I don't need exact values, a good supposition is enough.

You mean, build a gigabit router using a NetBSD box ?

I don't have direct experience in this, but I have tested gigabit ethernet
betwen 2 machines: a PC (celeron 400 with some sort of intel chipset) and
alpha DS20 (ev6 at 500Mhz). The alpha can push UDP at ~90MB/s and CPU isn't
at 100% (I don't remember details). the PC was at about 50MB/s with CPU at
100%. So, no go with a PC unless you go with a higth-end motherboard
(a single gigabit is close to the 32bit/33Mhz PCI bus, so you need 
2 or more PCI busses, or 64bit slots, or both depending on the number of
adapters you need). I believe my DS20 could drive 2 gigabit at full speed
without troubles, as when doing routing we don't have to cross the
kernel/userland barrier.

Now latency is another problem ... May not be an issue if you have to route
a lot of concurent flows, but will be if you have a single, large flow.
I don't have numbers on theses.

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
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