Re: Software router state of the art

[Joe Greco <jgreco () ns sol net>]

> On Sat, Jul 26, 2008, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > Was this with one packet flow, or with millions of them?
>
> I believe it was >1 flow. The guy is using an Ixia; I don't know how
> he has it configured.
>
> > Traditionally, software routing performance on hosts systems has been
> > optimized for few and rather long flows.
>
> Yup.
>
> And I always ask that question when people claim really high(!) throughput on
> software forwarding. It turns out their throughput was single source/single
> dest, and/or large packets (so high throughput, but low pps.)

I'm not sure where the claims about "{one, few} flow{s}" are coming from.
Certainly the number of flows on a typical UNIX box acting as a router is
not that relevant unless you specifically configure something like 
stateful firewalling, because the typical UNIX box simply doesn't have a
*concept* of "flows."  It deals with packets.  This has its own problems,
of course, but handling high levels of traffic in many flows is not one of
them.

There are other software routing platforms that DO flows, but the above
mentions "host[s] systems", so I'm reading that as "UNIX router."

On the flip side, packet size is definitely a consideration.  This topic
has been beaten to death on the Zebra mailing lists by myself and others
in the past.  

With yesterday's technology (P4 3.0G, 512MB RAM, PCI-X, FreeBSD 4) we were
successfully dealing with >300Kpps about 3 years ago, without substantial
work.  That was single source/single dest, but with a full routing table.
There's no real optimization for that within the FreeBSD framework, so it
is about the same performance you'd have gotten with multi source/multi
dest.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
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