Fredrik Carlsson wrote: > Hi, > > I'm planing to set up a new firewall and have a few questions about what > quad ethernet cards people recommend? > The server will probably be a Dell PE860 (they seem to be well supported > by OpenBSD), but what quad cards should i buy? what cards have good > performance?
While I was personally somewhat disapointed with the performance it was still pretty fast, the Intel Pro 1000 GT quad port: http://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/products/pro1000gt_quadport_server_adapter.htm I built 3 OpenBSD 3.6(?) servers in mid 2005 with these cards, and was able to get a peak throughput of about 520Mbps in bridged mode (pf disabled) measured using iperf. Interrupt cpu time was ~30%, the rest of the cpu was idle. CPU was I think single proc Xeon 3.6Ghz(dual proc supermicro motherboard for multiple PCI-X busses and stuff). I expected to be able to peg the CPU, but no matter how hard I hit it, it wouldn't go higher than ~30%. All in all the systems had 8 Intel GigE ports, a dual port PCI-X, a quad port PCI-X, and two onboard. It didn't matter what config I used, if the bridge was on one card or more than one, if it was going across one IRQ or two, the system wouldn't go higher than ~520Mbps. I was hoping to be able to get at least 1Gbps, if not 2Gbps. (the firewalls had two bridges serving different network segments). Redundancy was provided by OSPF on the switches. The systems were connected to fairly hefty Extreme Black Diamond 10808s, when I removed the bridge and just connected the switch back to itself(layer 3 virtual switching), throughput went up to around 900Mbps (I think I hit a limitation on the servers I was testing with at that point). I sent a few posts to the list back at the time, probably May-June 2005, I don't work at that company anymore so I don't recall exact specifics on everything. nate
