I get more than that with realtek nics on x86, problem is high interrupt rates even with msix, intel fixes some of those and chelsio makes it all go away...

Just saying :)

On 26/01/2015 23:27, Faisal Imtiaz wrote:
Hi Micah,

There is a segment in the Hardware Side of the industry that produces "Network 
Appliances".
(Folks such as Axiomtek, Lanner Electronics, Caswell Networks, Portwell  etc 
etc)

These appliances are commonly used as a commercial (OEM) platform for a variety 
of uses..
Routers, Firewalls, Specialized network applications etc.

Our internal testing ( informal), matches up with the commonly quoted PPS 
handling by the different product vendors who incorporate these appliances in 
their network product offerings.

i3/i5/i7 (x86) based network appliances will forward traffic as long as pps 
does not exceed 1.4million
                (In our testing we found the pps to be limiting factor and not 
the amount of traffic being moved)
                (will easily handle 6G to 10G of traffic

Core2duo (x86) based network appliances will forward traffic as long as pps 
does not exceed 600,0000 pps
                (will easily handle 1.5G to 2G of traffic)

Atom based (x86) network appliances will forward traffic as long as pps does 
not exceed 250,000 pps.

----------------------------------------

Of course, if you start to bog down the router with lots of NAT/ACL/ Bridge 
Rules (i.e. the CPU has to get involved in traffic management) then your actual 
performance will be degraded.

Regards.

Faisal Imtiaz
Snappy Internet & Telecom
7266 SW 48 Street
Miami, FL 33155
Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232

Help-desk: (305)663-5518 Option 2 or Email: supp...@snappytelecom.net

----- Original Message -----
From: "micah anderson" <mi...@riseup.net>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2015 5:53:54 PM
Subject: scaling linux-based router hardware recommendations


Hi,

I know that specially programmed ASICs on dedicated hardware like Cisco,
Juniper, etc. are going to always outperform a general purpose server
running gnu/linux, *bsd... but I find the idea of trying to use
proprietary, NSA-backdoored devices difficult to accept, especially when
I don't have the budget for it.

I've noticed that even with a relatively modern system (supermicro with
a 4 core 1265LV2 CPU, with a 9MB cache, Intel E1G44HTBLK Server
adapters, and 16gig of ram, you still tend to get high percentage of
time working on softirqs on all the CPUs when pps reaches somewhere
around 60-70k, and the traffic approaching 600-900mbit/sec (during a
DDoS, such hardware cannot typically cope).

It seems like finding hardware more optimized for very high packet per
second counts would be a good thing to do. I just have no idea what is
out there that could meet these goals. I'm unsure if faster CPUs, or
more CPUs is really the problem, or networking cards, or just plain old
fashioned tuning.

Any ideas or suggestions would be welcome!
micah


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