On Mar 25, 2014, at 8:45 AM, David Noel <david.i.n...@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, it looks like it's the cable modem after all. Under load I'm
unable to connect to it's admin panel, even when I'm directly
connected to it. I called Comcast's technical support and had them run
their diagnostics on it while everything was running and it failed
miserably. The tech agreed with the conclusion that the modem was
incapable of handling the load. So it looks like I'm in the market for
a new cable modem. I'm not sure how to find one that will meet my
needs though. Any DOCSIS 3 compatible modem will work on Comcast's
network.
Does anyone know of any models that are designed for heavy load? I'd
probably need something that was built for networks of ~10,000 users.
I'm not sure what sort of load 10,000 users generates, but I suspect
it would peak around the 10-100 requests per second that my crawlers
are putting out.
If not, can anyone recommend a place where I might be able to find an
answer to this question? Mailing list? Web forum? IRC channel, even?
I'd really rather not have to pull specs on every DOCSIS 3 compatible
modem and make a best guess based on microcontrollers/CPUs.
Short answer: no DOCSIS cable modems are designed for that kind of
throughput!
Juniper sells MX480 routers to 10,000-customer-ISPs for ~$250k!
(Granted, that *is* overkill, but even 10k-user corporations will have
fairly high-end routers connected via fiber to handle that much traffic.)
Your best bet, I think, would be to find a DOCSIS 3 cable modem that can
be put into bridging mode. At that point, the CPU/RAM limitations of
the cable modem are no longer relevant.
Some confirmation:
-
http://jkoblovsky.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/how-to-use-your-own-router-with-rogers-docsis-3-0-upgrade/
-
http://communityforums.rogers.com/t5/forums/forumtopicpage/board-id/Getting_connected/thread-id/12199
(implies Hitron and Moto/ARRIS modems can also do bridge-mode)
- http://digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=145997&page=6
(implies SMC modem can do bridge mode)
- http://www.dslreports.com/faq/comcast/2.1_Modems#17174
(Comcast-specific)
Once your modem is in bridge mode, the bottleneck should be your
router. As you've mentioned, your ALIX boxes are pretty much at their
limit, too, so you're just moving the bottleneck around.
Apologies if I've missed something fundamental - I haven't followed this
thread from the beginning...
--
-Adam Thompson
athom...@athompso.net
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