Question about numbers of connections

[Yuriy Grishin]

Espartano wrote:
> On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 8:16 PM, Jon Radel <jon at radel.com> wrote:
>   
>> Sam Wun wrote:
>>     
>>> Alix is for home user.
>>>
>>>       
>> Which is just about as useful as the OP asking if the machine can handle "a
>> lot of traffic without troubles" without giving us any hint whether he means
>> traffic that keeps a 128 kbps DSL line semi-busy or if he has a 100 mbps
>> fiber to his house that's practically melting from all the traffic.  :-)
>>
>> That said, I'll report that for years I used a "consumer class" Celeron
>> machine with 384 MB of RAM to act as a firewall for some web sites with a T1
>> (1.5 mbps) of traffic hitting it at times, and had no known issues.  I've
>> upgraded a bit by now but mainly just because rather than to solve any
>> particular issue.
>>
>>     
>
> Ok, I think that I didn't explain it very well, I don´t have any hight
> speed network, I only have used my Alix board at my house, but I
> wondering how much work the Alix board could support, more
> specifically I wonder if the Alix board could manage about 1 thousand
> concurrent connections through a 100Mbps network making round-robin to
> load balance and spread the connections between 3 or 4 servers, I
> think that the Alix board could do it, It is only  a hypothetical case
> but I would like to know if I can trust on my Alix board to do this
> kind of job or not.
>
> In other hand, what kind of embedded hardware do you recomend to
> manage this kind of jobs ? maybe the answer could be buying a real
> server and replace the hard disk with a CF memory using NanoBSD + PF.
>
> Thanks a lot for your patience.
>
>   
I have a Pentium III machine with 128Mbytes SDRAM
two realtek cards and FreeBSD 6.3
It serves 40 pppoe users (raduis+mysql+mpd).
It connected to a Wi-Max 2Mbps link and does altq shaping (cbq).
In addition spamd and pfstat runs there (there is a bandwidth graphic 
here http 80.76.128.74 ).
More than 500Gbytes/month flows through this gateway.
In general it works satisfactory but as you can see the uptime is no 
good. That is because it has no UPS (ungraceful reboots are often).
It's a very stressful mode and the hardware its runs on is used (I just 
took an old pc of my friend).
But it works more than a year!

Another story :
I build a bittorrent-downloader for my friend lately. It was a P-200MMX 
with two Intel cards and 96Mbytes of RAM.
I tested It in my LAN and It gave about 8Mbps.
So if you take a good hardware network card that performs most the work 
by itself (not by CPU via the driver) I suppose you can easily achieve 
30-50Mbps.

Also read this http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/perf.html

-- 
Code cheap ($3 per an application)