[LARTC] Linux router performance

[Jesper Dangaard Brouer]

Hi

I'm sure that Robert can provide us with some interesting numbers.

I have just tested routing performance on a AMD opteron 270 (dual core), 
here I can route 400 kpps (tg3 netcards on PCI-X).  I use the kernel 
module "pktgen" to generate the packets (64 bytes in size).

Cheers,
   Jesper Brouer

--
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MSc. Master of Computer Science
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen
Author of http://www.adsl-optimizer.dk
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On Wed, 31 May 2006, Andreas John wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Maybe:
> Khan, Sohel; Waheed, Abdul (2003): High Performance Routing on
> PCshttp://www.ccse.kfupm.edu.sa/~sohel/networking/references/Routing.pdf
>
> A rule of thumb:
> - with current COTS hardware and (standard) PCI Bus, you can reach the
> maximum of the PCI bus bandwidth. That's 1 GB/s, e.h. two NICs with  500
> Meg/s each ( one in and one out )
> - with PCI-X and in the future PCI-express you'll for sure be able to
> reach more performance. I didnt find a sponsor for a test-lab yet :)
> - in DoS secnarios it may get worse :/ I heavily depends on driver type
> (polling and NAPI preferred). The problem with the performace is
> _always_ the number of interrupts, nothing else is a bottleneck (well,
> we didn't talk about thousands of iptables rules yet, but you ask for a
> 'maximum').
> - The question you have to ask in high-performance scenarios is not
> "MBit/s" but MPPS (megapackets per seconds). FreeBSD and Linux broke the
> 1 MPPS barrier some time ago (on dual xeons).
>
> rgds,
> Andreas
>
> Fermín Galán Márquez wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I wonder about the performance of a Linux box used as router (I guest I'm
>> not the first :). Althought I know it mainly depends on the hardware, I'm
>> trying to find some references on the topic or comparations with other
>> routing solutions (FreeBSD box used as router, Cisco, etc). For example,
>> http://facweb.cti.depaul.edu/jyu/Publications/Yu-Linux-TSM2004.pdf
>> (althought is related with Linux-briding more than with Linux-routing) shows
>> in Figure 14 that with an AMD Duron 1.3GHz 512M RAM a throughput of 90 Mbps
>> can be achieved.
>>
>> Anybody knows any other similar analysis, please?
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> --------------------
>> Fermín Galán Márquez
>> CTTC - Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya
>> Parc Mediterrani de la Tecnologia, Av. del Canal Olímpic s/n, 08860
>> Castelldefels, Spain
>> Room 1.02
>> Tel : +34 93 645 29 12
>> Fax : +34 93 645 29 01
>> Email address: fermin.galan at cttc.es