Date: Sat, 24 Jun 1995 14:07:11 -0700 (PDT) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> To: davidg@Root.COM Cc: nc@ai.net, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD as a router Message-ID: <199506242107.OAA13740@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> In-Reply-To: <199506242048.NAA00597@corbin.Root.COM> from "David Greenman" at Jun 24, 95 01:48:25 pm
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... > >On a pentium, we are under the assumption that the bus and processor > >aren't the limiting factor, and just BSD is slowing things down. So what > >is it? > > I think we should assume high performance hardware. The difference in cost > between a Pentium-90 w/PCI (bus mastering DMA) ethernet card and a 486/66 > w/ISA ether is fairly small these days (unless of course you already have the > 486/66...). The limitation is definately software at this point. That's why we > do well in bytes/sec, but poorly in packets/sec. I would like to quantify that ``fairly small these days''. AMD DX2/66 CPU chip, $131.00. Intel P54C-90 CPU chip $421. Over 3X, something I defanitly would not call a ``small amount''. Then add to that the difference in MB cost, $100 for the lowend 486MB, vs over $200 for the lowest price P90 MB I could find. Again 2X. Now onto the ethernet card, $49.00 for a cheap ISA WD80xx clone, $99.00 for the a PCI card. So it looks like $280 vs $720. I would call that ``significant'' amount of money. Also since this is probably going to be highly memory speed dependent I suspect an ASUS PCI/I-486SP3G (PCI) could route packets just about as fast as an ASUS PCI/I-P54TP4 due to the fact that thier main memory speeds are *very* close. (Note the ASUS 486SP3G costs as much as the P54TP4 so the price scale is only the CPU delta, but you get a free NCR SCSI controller in the deal :-).) > >high. On higher utilized networks, I can't imagine 10-12 ms latency on a > >80 megabit stream of packets is a problem. > > We're not talking anywhere near that much delay. ...More like 700-800us. > Again, the problem isn't latency or 'bandwidth'. The problem is packets/sec. Agreed, and that is probably what was stuffing up my values, I will do a more complete test and see what I can get. -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Accurate Automation Company Reliable computers for FreeBSD
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