On Thursday 07 March 2002 10:18 am, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote: > > > We run F5 Networks BigIP and I've been able to push over 100MB/sec with > > > no packet loss through them. Is NetFilter this fast on a PIII 500 > > > w/ 512MB RAM? > > > > The machine won't make it even without netfilter. > > Actually it should, I have seen several machines like this used as cheap > routers. They even perform better than 10x more expensive cisco solutions.
Are talking about megabits per second here, or megabytes per second ? If it's 100 megabits per second you're trying to get through a box, I'd say yes, no problem - we do that all the time (with netfilter running too). However, 100 megabytes per second ? I think that's beyond the standard PCI bus capability... 32bit bus running at 33MHz = approx 1000 bits per second, however there are (at least) two network cards; you have to read the bits from one and write them to the other, so this gives a max throughput of 500 bits per second (assuming the processor can keep the PCI bus saturated, and the NICs can keep up with efficient reads/writes). This is one reason I've never quite understood the existence of Gigabit Ethernet cards with standard PCI interfaces..... they're hardly going to work efficiently. Antony.
