FreeBSD as a gigabit router

[Niki Denev]

2007/10/3, Cristian KLEIN <cristi at net.utcluj.ro>:
> Hi list,
>
> A few days ago I tested whether a FreeBSD 7 box is able to handle Gigabit
> traffic. So I used a Cisco 7600 and added static routes from the router to the
> box and from the box to the router, so that some packets would loop between the
> two. Then I externally injected 30Mbps of "ping -f -t 255 -s <size>", which
> should have generated a "maximum" of 3,6Gbps. I then used nload on the box to
> graph the bandwidth.
>
> The box is a Intel Core 2 Duo, with a PCIe re NIC. I used FreeBSD i386 with
> polling and fastforwarding. No WITNESS, INVARIANTS or firewalls.
>
> I was amased to see that injecting 1000 bytes packets gave a maximum throughput
> of 650Mbps, while 1400 bytes gave 750Mbps. During both tests one core was 98%
> idle, while the other one was more than 80% idle.
>
> 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?
>
> Thanks.
>
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>

Using icmp and especially "ping -f" does not sound like a good idea
for testing network thoroughput. Maybe you should consider something
like iperf or netperf (/usr/ports/benchmarks/iperf and
/usr/ports/benchmarks/netperf)

-- 
Niki