[LARTC] Hardware Requirements for qdisc htb/sfq

[Marek Kierdelewicz]

>My question is what are the general hardware requirements for routing
>to about 20 subnets (class c), traffic shaping for about 50 fiber
>customers (TC QDISC), 2 T1s (straight into the Linux router) and about
>35MB of traffic out to the next ISP? We are planning to implement BGP
>sometime in the near future.

From my experience router load is mostly dependant on pps (packet per
second).

I was doing statefull 550k pps on Athlon64 X2 5200
cpu usage was ~50% per core.

I'm doing stateless > 1m pps on Quad-core Xeon(R) CPU E5345 @ 2.33GHz,
peak cpu usage is less then 25% per core 

both configs used e1000 nics, 1GB Ram
both boxes were running BGP

>I have been searching everywhere for some kind of guidelines, but I see
>none. If anyone could give me a round about answer that would point me
>in the right direction I would be obliged.

Use irqbalance of smp affinity to distribute irqs between cores. Make
your router stateless or optimeze netfilter settings related to
conntrack (more memory, bigger hashtables ect)

>2.0GHz Dual-Core Xeon, 4GB 667MGz RAM, 2x1Gbit Network Interfaces.

Quite a lot of ram for statefull firewall + BGP (1GB would probably
suffice). As for CPU diagnose your network and compare your pps with the
numbers and platforms I specified.

cheers,
Marek Kierdelewicz
KoBa ISP