FreeBSD as a gigabit router

[Kirill Ponazdyr]

> Hi list,
>
> A few days ago I tested whether a FreeBSD 7 box is able to handle Gigabit
> Can anybody point me what the bottleneck of this configuration is? CPU was
> mostly idle and PCIe 1x should carry way more. Or is the experiment
> perhaps
> fundamentally flawed?

ICMP is not a good way to perform such tests as many have mentioned,
better use iperf.

We have a FreeBSD 6.2 / pf box handling 2Gbps of traffic, real traffic, it
will probably handle more, we just had no capacities or need to test.

Hardware is a Single 2.4 Ghz Xeon with 2 x Intel Quad Pro 1000MT PCI-X
Controllers on separate PCI-X Busses.

Here are most optimal options:

Kernel:
------------------------------------
options         DEVICE_POLLING
options         HZ=2000

Sysctl:
------------------------------------
kern.polling.idle_poll=1
kern.polling.user_frac=20
net.inet.ip.fastforwarding=1
net.inet.ip.intr_queue_maxlen=5000
kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=8388608
net.inet.tcp.sendspace=3217968
net.inet.tcp.recvspace=3217968
net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=1

Regards

Kirill