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Date:      Fri, 27 Apr 2001 01:02:24 +0400 (MSD)
From:      "Vladimir B. Grebenschikov" <vova@express.ru>
To:        Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
Cc:        Mike Tancsa <mike@sentex.net>, freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: number of interfaces and performance ?
Message-ID:  <15080.36064.716054.787473@vbook.express.ru>
In-Reply-To: <20010426091343.F18676@fw.wintelcom.net>
References:  <5.1.0.14.0.20010424145602.05c353a0@marble.sentex.ca> <20010426091343.F18676@fw.wintelcom.net>

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Alfred Perlstein writes:

 > > I have the need to put together a somewhat largish VLAN router (larger than 
 > > I have done before) with about 35 interfaces.  Has anyone put anything like 
 > > this together ?  The box would be routing about 25-30Mb at peak rate.  I 
 > > recall reading something about LINUX being very inefficient when it comes 
 > > to multiple interfaces.  Does FreeBSD suffer from the same fate ?  I also 
 > > recall someone running into problems with 16 physical interfaces (4 x 4 
 > > multiport nics).  Not sure how much of that was an hardware resource issue 
 > > and how much a software resource issue . Will it work OK in theory, or 
 > > should I spend the $8K on a 3640 ? The largest I have right now is one with 
 > > 8 active VLANs and it works very well, but nothing over 10 and nothing 
 > > pushing 30+.  I have built the box and it works well enough in the lab, but 
 > > I dont know of course how it will work in production.
 > 
 > I remeber there being some sort of issue with large number of
 > interfaces, however I think it was trivial to fix and may have
 > already been.  Sorry if this isn't so helpful, but I can't remeber
 > anyone recently popping up and complaining about the perf with
 > lotsa NICs in machine.

I have machine vith 18 running interfaces, most of them VLAN
interfaces, but there are some LAN and WAN. It successful transfer
about 60-80Mbit/s (~90 in peak). Most of traffic goes throug Intel
EtherExpress ethernet NICs. 

For VLANs I use patch to allow passing IP packets 1500byte size.

Even not tried to use zero-copy network patches, may be it will grow
preformance.

This router have more than 20K interrupts per second, so picture on
'systat -vm' 1 looks like:

 2.3%Sys  34.4%Intr  3.1%User  0.0%Nice 60.3%Idl

Besides doing ip-forwarding and ipfw-firewalling, router do
full-traffic accounting dividing all traffic into categories got from
FullView BGP table.

CPU: Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon/Celeron (799.62-MHz 686-class CPU)
  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x686  Stepping = 6


 > -Alfred Perlstein - [alfred@freebsd.org]
 > Daemon News Magazine in your snail-mail! http://magazine.daemonnews.org/

--
TSB Russian Express, Moscow
Vladimir B. Grebenschikov, vova@express.ru

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