freebsd router

[Danial Thom]

--- "Matthew D. Fuller"
<fullermd at over-yonder.net> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 05:16:21AM -0800 I
> heard the voice of
> Danial Thom, and lo! it spake thus:
> >
> > Stop wasting your time and stay with FreeBSD
> 4.11. Its the fastest
> > router platform Man has ever created, and its
> likely to say that
> > way.
> 
> This may be the wildest exaggeration I've read
> all year (of course,
> the year is yet quite young).

I'd be interested in hearing your reasoning for
thinking so. There is little argument that
FreeBSD 4.x is perhaps the fastest Uniprocessor
O/S ever created for networking. SMP will likely
never be able to match it. It certainly can't
now, in the current state of development.

Routing is fastest when implemented as a single
process task. Once you start chopping up
(threading) the path you slow it down. While it
could be possible to have a faster routing
subsystem on a custom-designed MP O/S, its not
practical to build a general purpose O/S in such
a way.

So freebsd 4.x it is. Freebsd 4.x can route 25%
more traffic than its 5.x counterpart on the same
hardware. 5.x SMP is actually worse (as it drops
more packets at high traffic levels, and FreeBSD
4.x never drops packets until its overrun). 


DT

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