Flowtables -- any tuning hints?

[Barney Cordoba]

--- On Mon, 7/13/09, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:

> From: Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org>
> Subject: Re: Flowtables -- any tuning hints?
> To: "Kip Macy" <kmacy at freebsd.org>
> Cc: "Barney Cordoba" <barney_cordoba at yahoo.com>, freebsd-current at freebsd.org
> Date: Monday, July 13, 2009, 10:28 PM
> 2009/7/14 Kip Macy <kmacy at freebsd.org>:
> 
> >> The people who need 10gb/s are isps, universities
> and telcos; all of whom have a large number of flows. So I'm
> not sure exactly who is going to benefit from the work.
> >
> > There seems to be something unusual about the "large
> number of
> > prefixes" crowd in that any facility that doesn't
> directly benefit
> > them is not worth having. You are not the first to
> step up and sneer
> > with contempt, and yet do nothing to address the
> architectural flaws
> > that hamper forwarding performance for your workload,
> and you will not
> > be the last.
> 
> As one of "those people", the reason that we (I) dismiss
> flow table
> stuff as not scalable is because in those specific
> environments, flow
> table stuff has been used, abused and dismissed > 10
> years ago as just
> not scaling.
> 
> The problem is this (and I've spoken to Kip at lengths
> about this too)
> - a company funded Kip's work to improve performance in a
> particular
> area and with a particular set of functions/features.
> Whether or not
> _I_ particularly think it is or isn't a good idea isn't
> really
> relevant if I'm not willing to stand up and do something
> about it.

Thats a load of BS. So if you don't have time to fix something yourself,
you should just keep your mouth shut and accept anything that comes along?

Perhaps if there was more criticism and less back-patting FreeBSD would
bear some semblence of an organized effort rather than a cobbling 
together of personal science projects? 

BC