FreeBSD boxes as a 'router'...

[Edinilson - ATINET]

Hi,

I´m using Freebsd as a 'router' since version 4.3 (after this, 5.x, 6.x, 
7.x). Now we are using FreeBSD 9.0-STABLE 64 bits on a Intel Server Boards 
S3200SH/S3210SH with 16gb RAM, 500gb SATA disk.
In these years, we always use SuperMicro´s OR Intel´s Motherboards and Lan 
Cards from Intel (fxp and em) together with Freebsd.

But, even using Intel Lan cards, we *NEVER* would be able to use polling 
without any kind of problem.

Our upstream is 140Mbit, and even in our very busy ISP environment (BGP Full 
Routing+several ipfw filters+several graphs being generated), this machine + 
FreeBSD 9 can acomplish the task without problems.

ps: You could try CPU AFFINITY in the new FreeBSD kernel version to get best 
results (instead of polling):
http://segfault.in/2010/09/how-to-set-cpu-affinity-for-a-process-in-freebsd/


Good luck!

Regards

Edinilson
------------------------------------------
ATINET
Tel Voz: (0xx11) 4412-0876
http://www.atinet.com.br


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Fretby" <jfretby at googlemail.com>
To: <freebsd-isp at freebsd.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 1:35 PM
Subject: FreeBSD boxes as a 'router'...


> Howdy all,
>
> We've currently got an ageing HP DL360 running as a 'router' - it has
> 100Mbit in/out onto our network, and has two 'bce' NIC's providing in/out.
> It's running quite an old version of FreeBSD (6 I think) - but works.
>
> As the network gets busier we've noticed the amount of interrupt time on 
> it
> is climbing (as you'd expect - i.e. esp. if many small packets are being
> forwarded). Many moons ago we did experiment with this box - and enabled
> device polling (inc. upping the HZ on the box and recompiling the kernel
> etc). This didn't work very well at the time (probably because it was in
> it's infancy) so we left it off in the end.
>
> If we were to replace this box, with something new - say a SuperMicro 
> based
> system with two:
>
>   Intel 82574L's (em Driver Based)
>
> And enable polling - is it likely to "just work" these days? The current
> upstream is 100Mbit, we're looking to upgrade this to 1Gbit in, but with
> say 200Mbit comitted on it (so shouldn't go above 200Mbit).
>
> Is there anything that has to be done to enable polling - other than
> recompiling GENERIC to support it? - i.e. no HZ hacks or anything needed 
> on
> 'modern' machines (it's a quad core Xeon).
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jon.
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