Re: Software router state of the art

[Sargun Dhillon <sdhillon () decarta com>]

This is not exactly true. The modern Linux kernel (2.6) uses some amount 
of flow tracking in order to do route caching. You can check this out on 
your system by:
"ip route show cache"

It keeps track of Src/Dst/QoS/Ethernet adapters/etc.. Additionally most 
systems have the iptables modules loaded in kernel and the conntrack 
module in kernel. This immediately activates connection tracking, 
therefore considerably slowing down software routing. The most optimal 
way of speeding this up would be sticking the route cache into somewhat 
faster memory. Though it would be fairly nice to get rid of the route 
cache as that can cause problem with eccentric setups. Also, as cache 
entries take a moment to be deleted, or degrade leading to convergence 
times being higher.





Joe Greco wrote:
> > 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
>   



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Sargun Dhillon
deCarta
sdhillon () decarta com
www.decarta.com