Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 11:07:53 -0600 (CST) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: shovey@buffnet.net (Steve) Cc: jdd@vbc.net, richardc@csua.berkeley.edu, isp@freebsd.org, chad@gaianet.net Subject: Re: Decision in Router Purchase Message-ID: <199611141707.LAA25384@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.95.961114090207.17009Q-100000@buffnet11.buffnet.net> from "Steve" at Nov 14, 96 09:03:26 am
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> On Thu, 14 Nov 1996, Jim Dixon wrote: > > > On Thu, 14 Nov 1996, Veggy Vinny wrote: > > > > > > Don't buy a 2501. You can get a lot more performance for the same > > > > amount of money using FreeBSD and sync serial cards. > > I dont know why people are bashing the 2501's - with an access list > active, my router stats on one of my T-1s has at times shown thruput very > close the to max a T-1 one can handle going full guns. Excellent! Now try it with data packets that are somewhat smaller than 500 bytes. My 386DX/40 with one of the ET cards was able to max out a T1 (at least in one direction, the inbound channel was probably not maxxed), as long as the data packets were moderate to large. With 60% saturation my CPU was more than 50% idle, but that number dropped rapidly as it approached saturation. Once it started seeing more small packet traffic, it started to display the dreaded slow-blinking-cursor syndrome that indicates you are way over what the CPU is able to handle. Now it is a 486DX5/133 with a pair of PCI DEC 21041's instead of a cruddy NE2000, and I do not worry too much about it :-) What is the CPU in a 2501, anyways? I think a 68000 but that is not first hand experience. I have some Sun 3/60's with 68000's in them, anyone want one? They are roughly comparable to a 386DX/25. On a very much related-to-routers note... I do have a sad report. Trantor, my mega-386DX/40-from-hell with 6 ISA Ethernet cards, was taken out by a faulty hub (don't know exactly what happened yet). It was replaced (at least temporarily) by a nice ASUS P55T2P4 Pentium 100 with a Znyx 314 and (alas) an NE2000... The following tests are purely routing, with several other boxes providing the beating. Doing a wire to wire FTP transfer with all 21x4x based cards gets me about 2500 packets per second, with a massive number of collisions. procs memory page disks faults cpu r b w avm fre flt re pi po fr sr f0 w0 in sy cs us sy id 0 0 0 31712 3288 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 9 5587 38 8 0 26 74 0 0 0 31712 3288 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5013 34 7 0 25 75 0 0 0 31712 3288 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5106 30 6 0 26 74 0 0 0 31712 3288 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5304 30 6 0 28 72 0 0 0 31712 3288 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5435 34 7 0 33 67 I like the % idle :-) Doing the same thing out the NE2000 based port gives the same throughput but only 5% idle :-( (Moral of the story: NE2000 sucks, but we all knew that). Now I try nailing it with "ping -f"... procs memory page disks faults cpu r b w avm fre flt re pi po fr sr f0 w0 in sy cs us sy id 0 0 0 31612 3284 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8390 32 6 0 36 64 0 0 0 31612 3284 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8392 42 6 1 40 60 0 0 0 31612 3284 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 5 8068 32 7 0 35 65 0 0 0 27352 3284 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 7045 34 7 0 36 64 0 0 0 27352 3284 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8392 30 6 0 36 64 0 0 0 27352 3284 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8029 30 6 0 41 59 0 0 0 27352 3284 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 7533 30 6 0 33 67 0 0 0 27352 3284 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8657 30 6 0 39 61 0 0 0 27352 3284 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8869 42 8 1 37 62 0 0 0 31528 3284 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8789 42 8 0 38 62 We are handling about 4K packets per second and maybe now are just starting to break a sweat.. response is still _instantaneous_. I tried a few other things and the numbers I got were varied. I was not doing a particularly scientific test, I just wanted to make it fall over, and I couldn't. The box was also handling my normal network traffic while taking this pounding... This has nothing to do with the T1 thing, I realize, but when we start talking about the ability of routers to route. ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/546-7968
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