Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 08:39:20 -0600 (CST) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: peterb@telerama.lm.com (Peter Berger) Cc: jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com, mrcpu@cdsnet.net, andreas@knobel.gun.de, dennis@etinc.com, hm@altona.hamburg.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Multi-Port Async Cards Message-ID: <199602011439.IAA08797@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.91.960201064854.6493B-100000@ivory.lm.com> from "Peter Berger" at Feb 1, 96 06:51:24 am
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> Joe, > > The observation that a FreeBSD box acting as a router is "mostly idle" is > bogus; since routing takes place entirely in the kernel and "idleness" is > a measurement of the number of processes in userland waiting to run, I'm > not sure it's an accurate measure. When comparing the execution times of a CPU intensive program as a measure of CPU loading, and vmstat's report of system and idle times, I have found that there is a strong correlation between how many packets the machine is routing per second and both of those numbers. If I can run a CPU hungry program and it only takes 25% longer even though the box is routing hundreds of packets per second, I tell you the router is mostly idle. The claim is certainly not bogus. > The real issues are 1) A Cisco will give you better interface performance > than almost any PC; Yes. Of course. On the other hand that may not be an issue if you're a true performance freak, because YOU DON'T LET YOUR ETHERNETS GET BUSY ENOUGH FOR IT TO MATTER. :-) My news server is on its own wire (well shares it with one other box). My DNS/mail/general purpose servers share one wire. My Web server is on its own wire. Helicon (the local FreeBSD archive-to-be) is on its own wire. Solaria and Wye are on their own wire. The only wire that looks anything near overloaded is the one with news on it.. I'm not stupid enough to put everything on one big wire and pray that it all works out. So many places are dumb and do put everything on a wire and trust their Cisco to deal with it, in reality they don't have an architecture which allows them to use the Cisco well. If my networks were hopelessly busy I am sure I would see a Cisco handling the strain better than a FreeBSD box. On the other hand, as it stands, a Cisco is an expensive luxury that you are welcome to donate but will do NOTHING for me. :-) > 2) the port density of a Cisco is much better, I'm still waiting for support for quad-port PCI Ethernet cards. With 16 interfaces per box I could be very happy... > and 3) > you can't be tempted to do stupid things with a Cisco like "Hey, let's > put a web server on our router today." Well, if you're not disciplined, you shouldn't be in this business anyways. > Cisco's customer response is pretty much second to none. We've never had > to wait more than next-day for spares, when we need them. That's impressive. And not necessarily the norm. > "The law locks up both man and woman/Who steals the goose from off the common > But lets the greater felon loose/Who steals the common from the goose." -anon ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/546-7968
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