FreeBSD, quagga (BGP) and 2950 VLANs

[Daniel Pocock]

Kurt Jaeger wrote:

>Hi!
>
>  
>
>>>Doing a straight FTP transfer from one server to another 
>>>through a CIsco 3640 seems to cap at about 40 Mbits/second so I was 
>>>wondering how that compares to a x86 system running FreeBSD.
>>>      
>>>
>>The tests I made using some shuttle.com barebone hardware etc
>>seems to max out around 500 mbit/sec. It wasn't a full-blown BGP setup,
>>far from it. More seems easily be possible, but we still need
>>to test.
>>    
>>
>
>If you use ftp, the limit might be the IO from/to disk, not the cisco
>throughput.
>
>Use ttcp to test the transfer limits, not ftp.
>
>http://www.mirrors.wiretapped.net/security/packet-construction/ttcp/ttcp.c
>
>  
>
Thanks for all the great answers.  I think that packets per second is 
just as important as megabits per second when evaluating routing.  We 
are a wholesale VoIP operator, so we switch many small packets (less 
than 100 bytes each) - it takes almost as much CPU power to make routing 
decisions for a 100 byte packet as for a 1500 byte FTP packet.  You will 
find much of the Cisco specs talk about throughput in packets per second 
(pps, or kpps).

The NIC I am using is the built in Intel i82555 in a DL360 1U server.  
According to vlan(4), the fxp driver doesn't do native VLAN, but can do 
large MTU for VLAN tagging.  This should give enough performance for our 
initial requirements (up to 10mbit) and I'll review it later.

I'm also curious about whether FreeBSD supports polled rather than 
interrupt driven behaviour in the NIC driver - that means that the 
system won't keep on re-entering an interrupt handler concurrently while 
under load (when a DoS attack is in progress).

The server will be set up tommorrow - I'll do some tests and publish my 
experiences on my web site, as I know several of my customers want to 
duplicate this for their own redundancy plans.

Regards,

Daniel

--------------------------------------
Director
London Voice and Data Exchange Limited
http://www.lvdx.com
--------------------------------------


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