FreeBSD as a gigabit router

[Artyom Viklenko]

Cristian KLEIN wrote:
> Thank you all for your replies.
> 
> Kirill Ponazdyr wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> I used this test, because it proved perfect when, almost a decade ago, gigabit
> appeared. There wasn't anything at that time that could fill 1 Gbps, so we used
> the routers themselves to do the job. Also, I used this setup to avoid TCPs
> congestion control mecachnism and sub-maximum bandwidth.
> 
> Of course, when I said "ping -f", I didn't mean a single "ping -f", but rather
> enough ping -f so that the looping packets would saturate the link.

You can use option -i instead of -f:

ping -nqs 1472 -i 0.00001 1.2.3.4

will generate large enougth amount of 1500 bytes packets.
Even more, use size more than 1472 and number of packets
will be increased. Value of -i parameter can be increased too.

But remember about sysctl variable net.inet.ip.maxfragsperpacket.
By default, in FreeBSD 6.x it's value is 16.

> 
>> 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.
> 
> Could you tell me, is there any difference between 1000PT and 1000MT, except the
> slot type? Also, is there any difference between Intel Desktop and Intel Server
> adaptors, or are these just marketing buzzwords?
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-net at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-net
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-net-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"


-- 
            Sincerely yours,
                             Artyom Viklenko.
-------------------------------------------------------
artem at aws-net.org.ua | http://www.aws-net.org.ua/~artem
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve   -  http://www.freebsd.org