> Hi,
> I have two fw platforms, mono 1.21 running on a Nokia120 and 
> pfsense1.0beta2 running on an AMD athlon 900.
> 
> I can get 2.2MBs on the 120 platform, at >96% cpu usage. 

That's ~20 megabits/sec, not bad for an IP-120 given its horsepower, What
sort of traffic ?

>On 
> the athlon, 32bit, 33Mhz pci, I can get 7MBs using Intel PRO 
> 1000MT 64 bit PCI cards.

I would have expected better than that, speaking from personal experience,
5-6 years ago an IP-650 running FW-1 would easily fill a fast-e connection,
the guts of an ip-650 is in the same cpu class as an athlon 900. 

> 
> My question is what speed/type cpu do I need to use to 
> improve on this with a PCI-X bus? (64bit, 33Mhz or maybe 66Mhz)

12 months ago I installed a fbsd/pf firewall for a client with 2 * bge & 2 *
em on a proliant dl-360 with a 3.2 ghz Xeon. , 
The em's were iperf'd @ ~930 megabits/sec on that hardware. 

I'd love to get the chance to throw an Avalanche at a decent system running
PF to see what it really can stand upto. 



> I would like to get 15-20MBs, but without spending too much. 
> I am looking at a 2nd hand Supermicro FPGA370 dual Pentium 
> mb, with PCI-X bus.

That depends on the traffic you're pumping through, high rate small packet
UDP will put a lot more load  on a firewall than jumbo sized streaming TCP. 

PCI-X will remove the gig-e throughput bottleneck. 


Greg

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